From his experience in FinTech, Sitoyo Lopokoiyit is fluent in the buzzwords that have come to characterize the active sector.

Open platforms, Artificial Intelligence, big data, crypto are some of the recent ones.

The latest of these is the super app, a common and ubiquitous concept from Asia, particularly China, that has since led to the development of a virtual marketplace of various products and services.

M-PESA jumped on to this wave in June last year with the launch of its super app. Sitoyo, who doubles as the Managing Director, M-PESA Africa, and Chief Financial Services Officer, Safaricom, says the app was inspired by its more experienced Chinese counterparts, AliPay and Tencent.

The app is intended to be unlike other Safaricom products and services. It is fashioned to be an all-in-one app more like the Google Playstore of apps, where other apps can be hosted, or like Instagram, which enables users to view and buy products and services without leaving the app.

Close to a year after the launch of the M-PESA app and as M-PESA marks 15 years, there have been lots of lessons learnt and accomplishments that would not be obvious to everyone.

Sitoyo tells us more about the platform-based super app that is shaping digital economies with huge potential for the future of money.

Question: What was the thinking behind the creation of the super app?

Sitoyo: M PESA has been on a journey from 2007. We started with the SIM toolkit and then, two years ago, we introduced the USSD. With the universal USSD, we just give better customer experience where you don’t have to remember paybill numbers, you don’t have to remember short codes across all the 47 counties. You go to the M-PESA USSD, click county, you’ll see the county redirect to you. So it’s all about enhancing the customer experience.

The advent of smartphones means that we now can develop apps that actually give even better customer experience. When we were building the app, we took a lot of inspiration from what happens in China, with Alipay and Tencent, who have built what we call super apps. The first real kind of super apps have come from the Chinese market and we collaborated with Alipay. And while we were developing the M-PESA app, we incorporated components of the Alibaba platform, what we call the mini apps. The mini apps make M-PESA become a Google Playstore. So today, if somebody wants to develop an app for restaurants, you know, in Nakuru, they don’t have to take it to the Playstore. You can develop it in Nakuru and actually put it into the M-PESA. app and the mini program. And that means that because we have over 29 million customers, then they have a bigger reach for it. That’s how the concept of the super app is built. It is bringing in different products or services, digital products into one platform to be able to make it a truly lifestyle product.

Question: How has the market reacted to the M-PESA super app?

Sitoyo: First, we launched it very differently from M-PESA, other products or other Safaricom products. We launched it as a digital product. We call it the future of money. And that’s what we see in the super app. It’s the future of money and how our customers are going to use it for their lifestyle. So today, we have over 5 million downloads, over 2 million active customers on the mini apps, over 600,000 customers using the mini app, and we have about 100 in development and in the next few months, they’ll be 300 plus. We’ll also incorporate what we call web redirect to make it a holistic e-commerce platform within the M PESA super app.

Question: Any lessons and interesting insights that you have picked up over the last year?

Sitoyo: I think it’s been great feedback from customers on the journey. M PESA is a two-sided ecosystem: we have the business side and the consumer side. One of the interesting learning is the business super app, which is not talked about a lot. It’s actually more successful than the consumer super app in terms of usage. So we have over 425,000 merchants, and over 200,000 actually using the business app and over 47 per cent of transactions on the business app, which is a testament that we got it right in delivering a super app that helps businesses and empowers businesses. On the consumer side, we’ve actually done quite a bit, but there’s still a lot to be done to really make it more intuitive, and that’s what we’re working on. But overall, from the FinTech community, from customers, and you can see the trajectory of over 5 million downloads, there’s a lot of interest for them as a super app. So we were targeting to reach 10 million quite soon.

Question: There are other super apps in the market, such as Viusasa and Little Cab. What do you need to do differently to stay competitive?

Sitoyo: When it comes to competition, what I say is, to develop relevant products and services for the customer, provide the best customer experience that’s out there and let the customer decide. For us, we were the ones who started this and it’s free to innovate in this country. So it’s good to see Little Cab trying to do a super app or somebody else. There are going to be many. And sometimes this is just a buzzword in the industry – open platforms, AI, big data, Blockchain, crypto, you know, there are over 1000 cryptocurrencies in the world. So it is interesting to see that happening. For us it is to develop a super app. Let them come and put it in a mini-program. Because how many apps can somebody use? How many apps can an individual use in a day? M-PESA is used every day.

Question: What’s in the future for the M-PESA super app?

Sitoyo: I think is to add more products and services to make it a truly lifestyle and an e-commerce platform. So we want people to be able to operate almost like Instagram: you can put in your products and services on the mini program. There’s business to business, consumer to business and so on and so what we want to say it is it’s a payment platform and on it is built value-added services, e-commerce, remittances and so on. So for us is to look at the lifestyle of a customer and provide daily relevance. We don’t want to see M-PESA just used for payment. We want somebody to log in the same way they log into WhatsApp to see what’s happening. We’re going to add chat functionalities, groups for fundraising so there is a lot coming on. And what we’re seeing with the agile teams that are coming in on financial services is that they are going to have the freedom to really go out, understand customer needs, and bring them back into the super app. So that’s why the agile beats and what we’re trying to do from a strategic perspective is key.