Esther Waititu (L) chief financial services officer of Safaricom with Ambar Sur founder and CEO TerraPay.

Fintech TerraPay has partnered with Safaricom to enable more than 30 million M-Pesa mobile wallet-holders in Kenya to send real-time payments to Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Headquartered in the UK, TerraPay is registered and regulated across 27 global markets and says the Safaricom partnerships will spur a world of new possibilities for both companies.

TerraPay joins 35 partners under Safaricom’s M-Pesa Global enabling customers in Kenya to send and receive money to more than 170 countries.

In Safaricom’s last financial year ended in March, more than 917,000 customers used the Mpesa Global service.

Commenting on the new partnership, Ambar Sur, founder and CEO of TerraPay, says: “Our partnership with Safaricom will further boost our capabilities in providing an inclusive global financial ecosystem powered by our agile payments infrastructure and empower Safaricom customers with fast and affordable borderless payment options and access to TerraPay's widespread partner network of 7.5 billion bank accounts and 2.1 billion mobile wallets.”

He adds: "We believe this breakthrough collaboration with Safaricom will spur a world of new possibilities for mobile financial service operators to directly scale globally and provide customers with a choice to send payments in a secure, transparent and swift manner.”

Esther Waititu, chief financial services officer at Safaricom, comments: "For financial services to thrive, we have to work with partners in a well-organized ecosystem. So this partnership is really important to us in opening up a corridor that previously we have not accessed.

"When this continues to be as successful as we see it, we will then go into phase two, extending to banks and other countries within the southeast Asia corridor, to countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, and India."