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The number of mobile money subscribers declined 0.2% in the first three months of the year to September in what Communications Authority (CA) attributes to loan defaults. According to first-quarter data from CA, the number of mobile money subscribers declined to 34.6 million from 34.7 million during the fourth quarter of the last financial year ending June. “As at the end of the period under review, the number of active mobile money subscriptions dropped by 0.2% to stand at 34.59 million subscriptions. This is attributed to the increase in the number of mobile loan defaulters whose SIM cards remained inactive during the reference period,” said CA. The rise of digital loans has led to an exponential rise in digital lending where consumers are often required to give their mobile numbers to access the loans which are sometimes deposited directly in their mobile money accounts. During the period under review, the total value of mobile money deposits grew 16% to Kshs. 1.2 trillion from Kshs

About 500,000 Safaricom #ticker:SCOM customers have taken up smartphones on credit that require daily repayments of as little as Sh20, boosting the telco’s quest to ramp up data revenues. The telco in July last year launched the device financing plan dubbed ‘Lipa Mdogo Mdogo’ to give customers still using feature phones an opportunity to own a 4G-enabled phone. It targeted to offer one million affordable smartphones in partnership with Google in the race to grow its data business to offset a decline in mobile calls, where it has seen a small revenue fall due to saturation. “Lipa Mdogo Mdogo has seen over 500,000 Kenyans upgrade from 2G devices to quality and affordable 4G smartphones,” said Safaricom chief executive Peter Ndegwa yesterday. “Through this partnership, we seek to meet the varying needs of our customers by increasing the selection of devices available under the world-first device-financing plan.” Safaricom has expanded its partnership for the device financing plan implemen