Vodafone earned US$15.6 million in license fees from Kenya’s M-Pesa in the year to end-March 2011, according to the annual report of Safaricom, the Kenya mobile operator which offers the mobile payment service. M-Pesa is actually owned by Vodafone and offered under license by Safaricom which pays a fee on a quarterly basis in return.

The M-Pesa license fee made up the vast majority of the US$21 million Vodafone earned in total fees from Safaricom, according to a report in The East African. The fees represent 12 percent of the US$130 million in revenue that Safaricom itself earned from M-Pesa in 2011. Mobile money transfers accounted for 2 percent of Safaricom's total US$1 billion revenue, the newspaper says. The operator is 40 percent owned by Vodafone.

Kenya’s M-Pesa has already established itself as one of the world’s most successful mobile money schemes; the operator now has 14 million M-Pesa customers, representing almost 80 percent of its total subscriber base, and 27,000 agents nationwide.

M-Pesa was launched by Vodafone's Tanzania subsidiary, Vodacom, in July last year, and it is reportedly being considered for rollout by other Vodafone-affiliated operators in India (Vodafone Essar), Egypt (Vodafone Egypt) and South Africa (Vodacom South Africa).