Growth in the potentially massive Indian market, and a strong contribution from Tanzania, was responsible for a 29 per cent year-on-year leap in money transfers between M-Pesa users, according to Vodafone’s first half results.

The operator picked out India, where M-Pesa only launched earlier this year, as well as the long-standing market of Tanzania as particular factors behind the stellar traffic growth in the six months to end-September 2013.

CEO Vittorio Colao (pictured) featured M-Pesa in a presentation that followed the results. He did not breakout the financial impact in India but the mobile money service is contributing 19 per cent of Vodacom’s revenues in Tanzania.

Egypt is another market where Vodafone has high hopes for M-Pesa because of its scale.

In India, Vodafone has opted for a phased approach which involves a gradual rollout region-by-region across the country.

However, success is far from universal with mobile money services. Vodafone has struggled to get M-Pesa off the ground in South Africa. M-Pesa is still running there and Vodacom plans to relaunch it in Q1 next year.

According to BusinessTech, CEO Shameel Joosub said the service has “a couple of hundred thousand customers,” which sounds significant except that the operator has 31 million mobile subscribers in the country.

Vodacom launched M-Pesa in August 2010, in partnership with local bank Nedbank.

Joosub said the operator would like to relaunch with a much bigger distribution network next year. He said regulations were now more friendly for mobile money services.