Tanzanians set for Africa’s first universal mobile money service

Customers in Tanzania’s Tigo Pesa are set to be the first in Africa to enjoy universal mobile services.

Tigo, a subsidiary of Millicom an international telecommunications and media company, announced that it had reached an agreement with Vodacom’s M-Pesa service.

“With Tigo Pesa customers will now have Africa’s first universal mobile money exchange system. They will be able to safely and securely transact with millions more people across the country,” Millicom’s Executive Vice President for Africa, Arthur Bastings said in a statement.

“It’s another first for Tigo Pesa and Tanzania. Following the success of the service with Airtel and Zantel, we hope many more Tanzanians will choose mobile money so that everyone benefits and we can extend financial inclusion even further. We also intend to pioneer similar agreements with networks elsewhere.”

Last year, the telecom firm launched the world’s first mobile money service with automatic returns for its customers to benefit from quarterly payments grounded on the balance held in their accounts.

“We launched Tigo Wekeza which basically is the first ever mobile money service that pays a return on customers’ balances. So basically people will see returns on the amounts of money they hold in their mobile wallet and they earn this returns on a quarterly basis at a competitive interest rate of about 7 to 9 per cent,” Diego Gutierrez, head of Tigo Tanzania told CNBC Africa in a previous year.

In August, the telecom together with Tanzania’s Bharti Airtel launched the world’s first cross-network money transfer service permitting customers to send money to users irrespective of which network they are registered on.

(Source: CNBC)