One of the most common pieces of advice from those who know about how to make more money is to not let money sit idly in your bank account.
A popular option is to put it in a Money Market Fund, where a fund manager will take it and invest for you, and you can access the money any time you want it, with certain conditions.
That people have money sitting in their M-PESA wallets, which is like money sitting in bank accounts, was one of the key insights as the team at Safaricom sought to develop a product to help with investments.
But there was a hitch. It is quite cumbersome.
“You have to fill out a form, you have to know which stockbroker to go to, which fund manager to go to and usually the investment size you start with is quite high,” said Aliya Khanbai, who leads the Wealth and Insurance Services team at Safaricom.
The eventual product was Ziidi, which was made available late 2024 and was officially launched in March 2025 as M-PESA celebrated its 18th anniversary.
With Ziidi, all one needs to start investing is KSh100 and a mobile phone. On a smartphone with the M-PESA super app, it takes just three steps to opt in and invest.
“Our aim was to democratise savings and investment. That means making investment accessible to Kenyans, and the only way we could do that was to bring down that accessibility and make it easy,” said Aliya.
Watch the video below to hear more from Aliya and Chief of Financial Services at Safaricom, Esther Waititu, on the thinking behind Ziidi, and how they accommodated a basic human instinct.
