On May 9, 2016, telecom firm Vodacom announced that it is giving up on M-Pesa in South Africa.

According to qz.com, Vodacom’s M-Pesa business in South Africa will officially shut down on June 30, 2016. The subsidiary of the British group Vodafone has indeed failed to reproduce the Kenyan mobile money experience. Let us recall that in March 2016, the firm’s management was hesitating between keeping the business running by introducing new offers, or shutting it down.

Sure thing was that the balance was tilting toward a complete shutdown rather than pursuing. Re-introduced in South Africa in August 2014 after 2010’s failure, M-pesa, which Vodacom intended to make a necessity for non-bancarized populations eying 10 million users, had only a million users at the end of 2015. Out of this number, only 76,000 users were actively using the service according to the firm. This represents less than 10% of registered users.

Vodacom however said it would pursue its Mobile Money experience across Africa, strengthening this business in promising markets such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Tanzania, where bancarization rate is still low. The firm which already has 8 million active users hopes to increase this number with time. It also put a lot of hope in Kenya where M-pesa counts 11 million active users.