Safaricom and Huawei Receive Prestigious Most Innovative Service Award at AfricaCom 2019

[Cape Town, South Africa, Nov. 14, 2019] Safaricom and Huawei have jointly received the prestigious Most Innovative Service, “the Business of Tomorrow” award at AfricaCom 2019 in Cape Town.

The award recognizes the two companies for offering a revolutionary new Mobile Money Overdraft service, known as “Fuliza”, which enables users with insufficient funds in their M-PESA accounts to borrow money to complete M-PESA transactions. The service was officially launched in January 2019 and has been gaining popularity in Kenya where Safaricom has over 23.6 million M-PESA users. Kenyans transacted over KES 6.2 Billion (USD 62M) in Fuliza's first month after its launch.

“Most Innovative Service” Award at AfricaCom 2019

Michael Joseph, Safaricom’s CEO said “M-PESA continues to play a leading role in deepening financial inclusion in the country. Fuliza enriches our mobile financial services portfolio, further fulfilling our promise to always provide customers with relevant products and services that meet them at their point of need. We are glad to partner with Huawei in bringing this commitment to life.”

Fuliza is empowered by the Huawei Mobile Money Finance Overdraft Platform which allows design, development and deployment of innovative finance products. This platform was created to enable credit overdraft facilities in multiple payment scenarios in a highly secure and stable way.

Over the years, Huawei has worked with Safaricom to improve its mobile financial services and develop new products, especially for loans and savings which can bring many benefits to individuals but also to SMEs to help grow their businesses.

Leo Lu, VP of Huawei Southern Africa Region said: “The award recognizes the two companies for offering Fuliza. With Safaricom in Kenya, Huawei has helped implement financial technology in the form of services like M-PESA and Fuliza. These have unlocked a whole new digital economy in the country.”

David Chen, VP of Huawei Southern Africa Region said: “Financial services requires security and stability. These two elements are in the DNA of all Huawei’s ICT solutions. We have focused on building a world-class application programming interface (API) to enable the local ICT ecosystem to tap into M-PESA to serve the needs of our clients for business success and to nurture the digital economy from a macro perspective.”

AfricaCom is Africa’s biggest telecoms and technology event which takes place annually in Cape Town, South Africa. This year, during this three-day event Huawei has showcased its end-to-end 5G ability, facilitating the industry’s digital transformation through innovative tools, platforms and solutions and explored new opportunities emerging for the industry from these new technologies.