M-KOPA Reaches 10 Million Customers As Smartphone Financing Scales

M-KOPA has crossed a major scale marker, reaching 10 million customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. The number matters because M-KOPA is not only selling smartphones. It is building a credit and digital-access model around people traditional banks often struggle to serve.

The company reached its first one million customers in 2020 after eight years of operations. Since entering smartphone financing that same year, it has added nine million more customers in six years and is now adding about 10,000 new customers daily. That kind of acceleration says a lot about demand for affordable device ownership across Africa.

M-KOPA calls its target customers “Every Day Earners”: traders, riders, tailors, shopkeepers and informal workers who generate income daily but may not have payslips, formal credit histories or easy access to bank loans. The company’s model turns the smartphone into both a productivity tool and a credit relationship.

M-KOPA’s “More than a Phone” platform combines smartphone financing with embedded insurance, credit and device protection at the point of purchase. That combination is important because the phone is increasingly the gateway to work, payments, communication, education, logistics, content creation and identity.

In Kenya, M-KOPA opened what it describes as the continent’s largest smartphone assembly factory in 2023. The facility employs more than 400 people, has achieved global ISO certification and has produced more than 3.3 million devices to date.

Nigeria has also become a standout market. The company says Nigeria was the fastest market in its history to pass one million customers. Across all markets, M-KOPA says its direct sales network now includes more than 40,000 agents.

M-KOPA is a useful example of how fintech in Africa does not always look like a banking app. Sometimes it looks like a device payment plan, a daily repayment model, a sales-agent network and embedded products that grow after the first purchase.

That makes the model different from conventional consumer lending. The customer receives a useful asset upfront, repayment is structured around daily cash flow, and the company can gradually offer additional services based on repayment history and device relationship.

The wider market context also supports the model. M-KOPA says revenue has grown at an average annual rate of 50 percent since 2020, and the company has appeared on the Financial Times’ Africa’s Fastest Growing Companies list for five consecutive years. Its own newsroom recently noted that it was onboarding more than 10,000 new customers daily as it moved toward the milestone.

This also connects with the broader African fintech infrastructure story. TechBooky has been tracking how payments and embedded finance are becoming the rails for many other services, from diaspora settlement to digital identity and consumer access.

The key question is whether M-KOPA can keep the model responsible as it scales. Device financing can expand opportunity, but it also needs transparent pricing, fair collection practices, strong consumer protection and clear explanations of insurance, credit and upgrade terms. Scale is powerful only if customers understand the contract they are entering.

For now, 10 million customers is a serious milestone. It shows that African fintech can grow by solving a very physical problem: helping people own the device that lets them participate in the digital economy.