The Impact of Improved Settlement Goes Beyond Speed
The Impact of Improved Settlement Goes Beyond Speed
In 2007, a Kenyan woman in Nairobi could receive money from her brother in London in about four minutes, via a text message to her phone. Before M-Pesa launched that March, the same transfer required a bank branch, a Western Union counter, or a trusted person carrying cash on a bus.
At the time, roughly three-quarters of Kenyan adults had no bank account. This wasn't for lack of demand, but rather infrastructure. Safaricom built that infrastructure with M-Pesa: a mobile-based payment service that quickly turned into a platform providing banking-equivalent services to the unbanked via a feature phone.
By the end of 2007, M-Pesa had over a million users. Safaricom’s business plan had projected 350,000. By 2009, it had reached approximately 65 percent of Kenyan households. M-Pesa became the dominant payment rail in Kenya faster than almost any financial service in history, in any market.
This rapid adoption created an opportunity for businesses to solve problems that had long existed, by using M-Pesa as their foundation.
Remittance operators like Sendwave built services that could deliver money directly to an M-Pesa wallet, almost immediately, with no bank account required. The recipient received an SMS, walked to an M-Pesa agent and withdrew cash.
Services like these weren't possible before. It was too expensive for banks to serve clients in rural areas. When M-Pesa laid the foundation that expanded geographical reach, new businesses were able to solve long-standing challenges.
By 2022, M-Pesa was handling around 92 percent of diaspora remittances flowing into Kenya. The businesses who had built their user experience and their operational relationships around M-Pesa early had the advantage.
Use cases also extended beyond remittance. Twiga Foods was a B2B platform connecting smallholder farmers with urban market vendors, aggregating produce from thousands of dispersed farms and delivering it to thousands of small retailers across the city. Farmers registered by phone, received a purchase order, delivered to a collection point, and were paid via M-Pesa within 24 hours. Vendors ordered through the app and received free delivery.
Twiga couldn't outrun its unit economics. It did, however, clarify an M-Pesa use case. Before M-Pesa, paying 17,000 farmers across Kenya through bank transfers or cash collection wasn't viable. M-Pesa made Twiga possible. The logistics model is what didn't survive.
M-Pesa's effect extended beyond settlement. Transaction history became a credit record for people who had never held a bank account. Micro-loan products used that data to underwrite lending to over 15 million Kenyans by 2016. Crop insurance reached smallholder farmers via mobile premium collection and mobile payouts, in areas insurance agents hadn’t previously visited. As a payment rail it became an identity layer, a savings product, and a credit bureau.
Across these cases, the problems weren't new. The infrastructure to solve them was. New infrastructure is never a silver bullet, but when it arrives, some operators are quick to recognise a gap it closes, and they absorb the friction building on something unproven.
As the market matures, entrants face a different problem, the roadmap is more certain, but customers have already built a strong relationship with the first-movers, barring any exceptionally bad experiences. This may be especially true where the gap being filled is a fundamental one; where the technology or infrastructure enables an outcome, rather than just improving it.
If new infrastructure creates a first-mover advantage, the time to move is early, before the market has matured. M-Pesa is a standout case, with fewer than 20,000 users in its first month to more than 1-million only a few months later, the need and market-fit were clear.
A handful of people understood the real opportunity – a new rail with unprecedented reach – and built on top of it before anyone else understood the potential.
Stablecoin infrastructure is beginning to close similar gaps, moving capital between developing markets and across corridors that correspondent banking prices out of viability. The analogy isn't perfect. M-Pesa was simple, trusted, and ubiquitous within a single market. Cross-border stablecoin rails are more complex, more contested, and harder to navigate without the right compliance infrastructure and regulatory standing behind you. But the question is the same: who moves early, while the infrastructure is new?
That's where FiveWest operates. Comprehensively licensed cross-border settlement infrastructure across African and Asian corridors, built for businesses who want faster capital movement without flying blind.
9/9/2026
FiveWest
