Like many others at the time, the team at Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) had no idea how big M-PESA would eventually become.

Eric Muriuki, the Chief Executive Officer at LOOP, was working with CBA at the time, and recalls the bank (which later merged with NIC Bank) working with Safaricom as it sought the regulator’s approval to start off M-PESA 18 years ago.

“In truth, I can’t say that we knew exactly what we were doing. It’s easy to say those things now that it’s successful, but we said, Let’s stay in the room. Let’s be a part of this and see where it goes,” he recalls.

CBA would go on and grow its role within M-PESA by helping develop M-Shwari, one of Kenya’s first digital savings and loans products. M-Shwari helped NCBA and its subsidiary LOOP grow from 60,000 customers in Kenya to 38 million in six markets across Africa.

M-PESA has also changed significantly, from being used to send money from person to person to integration with banks and as a payment platform, meaning that often, users don’t need to withdraw the cash.

As M-PESA continues to grow, said Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa, the plan is to make it completely worry-free for customers. This will be done by increasing its capacity from the current ability to handle 4,000 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second.

With 53 per cent of transactions on the platform currently free, as they are for amounts less than KSh100 for person-to-person and below KSh200 for payments, the majority of users already don’t have to worry whether it will work.

As they pondered the current and future of M-PESA as it turned 18 in March, Eric, Peter, and Esther Waititu, the Chief Financial Services Officer at Safaricom, pondered another question – what happens next for M-PESA?

For Peter, one of the most exciting prospects for M-PESA is the creation of products like Ziidi, which enable users to invest with as little as KSh100, and enhancement of savings products.

With M-PESA’s influence on mobile money around the world, says Eric, he considers M-PESA to be the world’s first digital currency. “M-PESA is essentially a digital currency that doesn’t use cryptography to assign trust to it. So, from that perspective, isn’t it time for M-PESA to be Africa’s digital currency?” he ponders.

Watch the video below to hear more of the thought-provoking discussion.