As the team at Safaricom was working on the product that would eventually become M-PESA, they sought the help of a likely partner – fuel stations.

The man they spoke to was Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, at the time the Business Advisor and Merchandising Manager at Caltex, then under Chevron Kenya Limited.

“A lady named Susie Lonie reached out. She’d come to use Caltex service stations as a cash in, cash out point for M-PESA agents,” Sitoyo recalls. “They had assumed that we owned and ran the service station, yet we owned but we franchised the stations to our dealers. And that’s exactly how the aggregator model in M-PESA, today used globally, came from that discussion between Caltex, me and the M-PESA team at that time.”

That was 2005, about two years before M-PESA was officially launched, and Sitoyo was one of the people who used the nascent money transfer service before it was launched.

Sitoyo would eventually join Safaricom in 2011 as Head of M-PESA Strategy and Business Development, a role he held before he moved to Vodacom Tanzania as Director, M-Commerce in 2015.

He then returned to Kenya and served as Safaricom’s Chief Financial Services Officer for three years before ascending to his current M-PESA Africa role.

“You cannot fathom what has happened and how the world has changed because of M-PESA. The impact is tremendous,” he says.

14 years since his first day at Safaricom and almost 20 years since his first interaction with what would eventually become M-PESA, Sitoyo’s passion and love for M-PESA shines through as he shares behind the scenes tidbits about Fuliza, Pochi la Biashara,  and Lipa na M-PESA.

What started as projects for Sitoyo and his teammates have now become household names which cater to the needs of the 34 million M-PESA users who push out 89 million transactions daily and account for 42 per cent of Safaricom’s  revenue.

Given his current continental role, Sitoyo’s gaze is now wider and further than the Kenyan borders, and he is adamant that there is more to M-PESA than just the Kenyan market.

M-PESA Africa was established in 2020 as a joint venture between Safaricom and Vodacom Group to accelerate platform development, synchronise product roadmaps, and enhance M-PESA operational capabilities into a single, fully converged Centre of Excellence.

Today, more than 60 million customers and 5 million businesses use M-PESA monthly across the 8 African countries where M-PESA is active, with transactions worth one million dollars transacted daily.

As M-PESA turns 18, says Sitoyo: “It’s great to see what started in Kenya has spawned into very successful M-PESA markets. But more importantly, there are over 200 countries worldwide that have introduced mobile money, and that came because of what started in Kenya.”

(This story was first published by Safaricom Newsroom)

~ By Sitoyo Lopokoiyit ~ CEO of M-PESA Africa