This week is financial inclusion week, a good moment to take stock of the multibillion dollar ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ that has been so successfully reaped by the financial inclusion industry.

Natasha is a young woman who has a cake baking business on the outskirts of Nairobi. She has a bank account for her business which she uses intensively. Natasha’s business was doing well and she needed a loan to expand.

For us, Fintech only matters if it is helping Kenyans solve real-world problems or seize genuine opportunities.

The rise of a new dawn in Kenya’s payments system

Eleven years after mobile money started in Kenya, a new dawn is rising – that of open and interoperable systems. Just as you can call people on any network in Kenya seamlessly, you can now send money across mobile money networks seamlessly.

Today, mobile money has managed to penetrate over 70% of the Kenyan population, with more people claiming access to services such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa than ever before.

Financial access is accelerating

Financial inclusion is growing, and fast. Kenyans excluded from any form of financial service dropped from over 40% of adults to 17% between 2006 and 2016.

Kenya’s annual financial inclusion lecture sets out how to protect consumers and drive growth in financial services

M-Shwari (meaning ‘calm’ in Kiswahili) is a combined savings and loans product launched through a collabo­ration between the Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) and Safaricom.

This reports gives an overview of the major issues surrounding financial inclusion during 2015 and highlights 10 of our initiatives.