There is a certain irony in the fact that it took Safaricom’s own My OneApp (OneApp) launch to finally push me into using Airtel Money seriously. For months — since December 2025, to be precise — I had an Airtel Money account sitting dormant on my phone, activated somewhat on a whim when I visited an Airtel Shop to pick up an eSIM for a phone review and the agent asked if I wanted Airtel Money enabled on my existing line at the same time. I said yes without thinking too hard about it. It was not a priority. Like the overwhelming majority of Safaricom M-PESA users in Kenya, I simply could not see the urgent value proposition of a second mobile money wallet when M-PESA was already handling everything I needed it to handle. The Airtel Money account sat there, dormant for the better part of four months.

Then Safaricom launched My OneApp on the morning of 7th April 2026, I reached for my phone to pay a restaurant bill, and everything I wrote about in my review of that launch — the forced re-registration, the Safaricom-data-only onboarding, the complete wipeout of all my saved favourites, the connection timeouts, the crashes — happened in real time, at a restaurant table, with a bill to pay. I documented that experience in detail and the post generated more traction online than almost anything else I have published this year. 

But what the published version did not capture is what happened next: I spent the following two days doing something I had never seriously done before, which was actually using Airtel Money as my primary mobile money interface. What I discovered in those two days has genuinely and materially changed how I think about M-PESA, about Safaricom, about Airtel, and about the nature of the relationship that tens of millions of Kenyan consumers have with Kenya’s dominant digital payments platform.

The Airtel App: A Lesson On Intentional Restraint

I want to begin with the Airtel mobile app itself, because it deserves its own moment of recognition before I get to the broader arguments. I have been using the My Airtel app for over a year, primarily to manage my Airtel Smarta Bundle subscriptions — the plan I switched to in early 2025 and have not looked back from, as I wrote about extensively at the time. What I had not done until this week was explore the Airtel Money functionality seriously. When I finally did, I was genuinely surprised by how well-designed the entire experience was.

The strongest user experience (UX) perspective on the Airtel app is restraint. The home screen gives you the basics immediately — your prepaid identity, your airtime, voice and data balances, and clear calls to action for buying bundles and managing your account — then separates Airtel Money as its own distinct module rather than mixing it into a discovery feed of everything Airtel could conceivably sell you. 

This is consistent with a coherent self-care mental model: I am here to manage an account, not browse an ecosystem. Navigation is handled through a persistent bottom bar — Home, Airtel Money, Home Wi-Fi, Help, More — which means the user always knows where they are and how to reach the main functional zones. There is no scavenger hunt. There is no cognitive overload. You open the app, you do the thing you came to do, and you leave.

There is a quote I keep returning to when thinking about product design — attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, paraphrased as “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.” The Airtel mobile app feels like it was built by people who had actually read that sentence and taken it seriously. 

The transaction flows in particular are exemplary: amount entry, an explicit confirmation sheet showing the merchant name, till number, and amount, PIN entry, and then a structured receipt screen with transaction ID and date and time. That layered confirmation chain does something that is underrated in financial app design — it reduces anxiety. In a market where mobile money is a utility that people depend on for daily survival, not a lifestyle feature, a well-structured receipt is not a minor UX detail. It is a trust signal.

Two specific features deserve particular praise as small UX moves with large trust implications. The first is that the post-transaction receipt screens are structured like actual receipts — verifiable records of what happened — rather than marketing pages inviting you to discover more services. 

The second is that the app offers the ability to mark a recipient as a favourite immediately after a successful transaction, which is the single most natural moment to build that convenience because the user has just demonstrated that payee matters to them. These are the details that tell you a product was designed with real customers in mind, not just product roadmaps.

On the payments layer, Airtel’s approach is what I would call multi-rail pragmatism. When purchasing bundles, the app presents Airtime balance, Airtel Money balance, and then additional payment rails including M-PESA, Visa and Mastercard cards via DPO and Tingg by Cellulant. Airtel is explicitly embracing the truth that in Kenya, users will fund and pay in whatever way works fastest in any given moment — even if that means routing a payment through a competitor’s wallet. 

I actually purchased my Smarta Bundle using M-PESA when I first signed up over a year ago. It worked flawlessly. This is, as I noted at the time, reminiscent of Microsoft under Satya Nadella: competing and collaborating simultaneously, without existential anxiety about which wallet your customer used to pay you.

The One Friction Point — & What It Possibly Means

There was one thing about the Airtel Money experience that genuinely perplexed me, and I want to address it directly. When I tried to top up my Airtel Money wallet, I found that it was not possible to fund it directly from my M-PESA wallet within the app. 

This is puzzling given that you can buy Airtel data bundles using M-PESA through the very same app with no friction whatsoever. I ended up funding my Airtel Money wallet through my mobile banking app instead, which worked perfectly but added an unnecessary step.

My honest suspicion — and I want to be clear this is inference rather than established fact — is that this friction may not be entirely accidental from a Safaricom architecture perspective. M-PESA’s API ecosystem is extensive and Safaricom controls access to it. The deliberate or structural limitation on direct wallet-to-wallet funding between M-PESA and Airtel Money would, if intentional, be a classic example of a dominant platform using technical friction to create switching costs. 

The Central Bank of Kenya has been pushing explicitly for greater mobile money interoperability — person-to-person portability and interoperable cash-out — and that regulatory direction matters precisely because it is designed to reduce this kind of structural lock-in over time. Whether the current friction is intentional policy or simply a product gap that Airtel has not yet prioritized as a first-class feature, it is a UX problem either way: if a capability exists but is not discoverable or accessible in the most natural user journey, it might as well not exist.

Safaricom’s Stockholm Syndrome: It’s Real!

Let me say something that I suspect many Kenyan consumers have felt but rarely articulate explicitly. The relationship that tens of millions of us have with Safaricom is not a straightforward commercial relationship between a service provider and its customers. It is something considerably more complex and, if I am being analytically honest, considerably more uncomfortable. I would describe it as the mobile money equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome.

Stockholm Syndrome, for those unfamiliar, is the psychological phenomenon where captives or abuse victims develop positive emotional bonds, sympathy, or dependency toward their captors as a coping mechanism for their situation. The parallels with Safaricom’s customer relationship are imperfect but uncomfortably close in certain dimensions. 

Safaricom provides genuinely excellent services — the network quality is real, M-PESA’s reliability has historically been real, the ecosystem depth is real. These are the small kindnesses that, in the psychological model, generate disproportionate positive feelings relative to the overall cost of the relationship. 

The costs — expensive data, expensive voice calls, the famous cultural perception that “Safaricom eats your data bundles,” the punitive pricing that makes switching feel financially rational but socially and practically complex — are rationalized, minimized, or accepted as the price of admission to something essential. 

The lock-in is maintained not primarily by force but by the network effects of M-PESA: your contacts are on it, merchants use it, your bank is integrated with it, your salary arrives through it. Leaving feels impossible even when the relationship feels exploitative.

I want to be clear: I am using this analogy with deliberate wit and analytical intent, not to trivialize genuine trauma. But I think the psychological architecture of the dynamic is real and worth naming, because naming it is the first step toward understanding why Airtel Money’s growth from 2.9 per cent to 11 per cent of Kenya’s mobile money market between December 2023 and December 2025 — data I analyzed in my recent Communications Authority sector statistics post — is not just a competitive data point. It is evidence of a quiet but accelerating consumer rebellion by people who have finally decided that the cost of the relationship with their captor outweighs the comfort of the familiar.

The Trickle-Up Effect: How Airtel Is Building A Movement From The Bottom Of The Pyramid

To understand why that rebellion is accelerating — and why it is structurally more durable than Safaricom’s current competitive posture acknowledges — you need to understand a concept that does not get nearly enough analytical attention in discussions of Kenya’s digital economy. It is the trickle-up effect, and it is one of the most powerful and under-appreciated forces shaping consumer markets at the base of the pyramid in Kenya and across Africa.

The trickle-up effect, as an economic theory, proposes that strengthening the financial position of lower and middle-income households stimulates demand and drives broader economic growth from the bottom up. Unlike the more famous trickle-down theory — which argues that benefits to the wealthy eventually flow to everyone else — the trickle-up model recognises that when you give people at the bottom of the economic pyramid genuinely accessible, genuinely affordable offerings, their aggregated spending power creates outsized commercial and economic impact. The mechanism is not charity or subsidy. It is volume. Millions of small transactions, each individually modest, collectively constitute a river of economic activity.

The clearest and most spectacular illustration of this dynamic in Kenya’s recent commercial history is the sports betting industry, and specifically the rise of SportPesa. The thesis that made SportPesa so successful — and so improbably large — is straightforward once you articulate it. Sports betting in Kenya is conducted primarily by millions of young Kenyans, many of them living at the socio-economic base of the pyramid, who spend modest amounts of money almost every day on the chance of winning something meaningful. 

These are not high-net-worth consumers placing premium bets. Many represent what economists sometimes call the resigned poor — Kenyans who have limited formal economic mobility but who participate actively in the informal and semi-formal digital economy through mobile money, airtime, and micro-transactions. 

Individually, each bet is small. Collectively, aggregated across millions of daily participants, those bets generated enough revenue to take SportPesa from a local startup to a company that sponsored a Formula One team and multiple English Premier League football clubs. That is not a normal trajectory for a business whose core customer is a young Kenyan spending KES 50 on a bet. It is the trickle-up effect operating at full velocity — a business model that derives premium commercial outcomes from mass participation at micro-transaction scale.

This is the same economic logic that underlies the kadogo economy — Kenya’s micro-transaction culture that I have written about extensively in the context of Poa Internet’s weekly unlimited internet proposition and the broader pattern of Kenyan businesses building commercially viable models around the purchasing behaviours of consumers at the bottom of the pyramid. 

The kadogo economy is not a curiosity or a concession to poverty. It is a genuine commercial architecture, and it is one that Airtel has been building with notable consistency across its product portfolio. The Airtel Smarta Bundle at KES 1,000 per month — which I have been on for over a year and which I have genuinely, permanently switched to from Safaricom data — is designed around the same logic. 

It is not priced for the premium urban professional who considers data cost a rounding error in their monthly budget. It is priced for the millions of Kenyan consumers for whom data cost is a real and recurring decision, and it delivers enough genuine value — 45GB, cross-network voice minutes, SMS, and cashback on Airtel Money transaction fees — that even I, who could afford Safaricom’s pricing, find it impossible to justify going back.

This is the trickle-up dynamic playing out in mobile money and mobile data simultaneously. Airtel is not winning Safaricom’s customers en masse — at least not yet. What it is doing is systematically acquiring customers at every tier of the market through offerings that are accessible, competitively priced, and good enough in quality that the price differential justifies the trade-off. 

Those customers, aggregated across millions of individual decisions, generate a compounding shift in market share that is already visible in the Communications Authority data. Airtel Money growing from 2.9 per cent to 11 per cent of Kenya’s mobile money market in two years is not an accident of marketing. It is the trickle-up effect in action — millions of Kenyans making individually small but collectively seismic choices about who gets their mobile money business. 

The cashback on every Airtel Money transaction — something M-PESA does not offer — is a particularly elegant trickle-up mechanic: it returns value directly to the consumer at the moment of transaction, which increases both the propensity to transact again and the emotional bond between the user and the platform. 

SportPesa understood this with betting. Airtel is understanding it with mobile money. Safaricom, whose pricing model is built for a different consumer reality, needs to understand it before the market forces the understanding upon them.

M-PESA Is A Digital Currency — & That Changes Everything

Here is the most radical idea I want to put forward in this post, and I mean it analytically rather than provocatively. After two days of using Airtel Money to transact with M-PESA merchants, M-PESA paybills, and M-PESA subscribers, I have arrived at a reframing that I cannot un-see: M-PESA, in its most fundamental form, is simply a digital currency — and like any currency, it does not require you to interact with it exclusively through its issuer’s interface (read that again, please). 

Think about this carefully. When I pay a Lipa na M-PESA till number through the Airtel Money interface, what is actually happening? I am transferring value that resolves into an M-PESA transaction at the merchant’s end. The merchant receives an M-PESA confirmation. The Lipa na M-PESA infrastructure processes the payment. M-PESA functions exactly as it normally would. 

The only thing that has changed is my interface — I am accessing M-PESA’s payment rails through Airtel Money rather than through the M-PESA app or Safaricom’s My OneApp. The mental model that says “to use M-PESA you must use Safaricom’s app” is, therefore, a false one. It is a perception Safaricom has benefited enormously from, but it is not a technical or logical necessity.

This is where the concept of open banking becomes instructive as an analogy. Open banking frameworks — already operating at scale in the UK, Europe, and increasingly globally — are built on the recognition that consumers should be able to access their financial data and execute financial transactions through any authorized third-party interface, not only through the institution that holds their account. 

Kenya is not yet operating under a formal open banking framework in the way the UK’s Open Banking Standard defines it, but the Central Bank of Kenya’s interoperability push is heading in a structurally similar direction. My Kenswitch and Visa analysis from earlier this month touches on the infrastructure that makes this kind of payment architecture possible. 

If mobile money interoperability reaches its logical conclusion in Kenya, Airtel Money becomes not just an alternative to M-PESA but a fully legitimate interface for M-PESA itself — which is precisely the competitive dynamic that makes Safaricom’s flawed My OneApp launch earlier this week so strategically consequential.

My OneApp Versus The Airtel App: What Two Days Of Real Use Reveals

Having now used both apps seriously in the same week, the contrast in design philosophy is stark and worth articulating precisely. The Airtel app is built around a self-care mental model: manage your account, manage your money, manage your connectivity, all within a predictable, stable, low-friction environment. 

My OneApp is built around an ecosystem mental model: live inside our platform, discover our partners, expand your digital life through our marketplace. Neither philosophy is inherently wrong. But the execution standards required to deliver each are radically different, and My OneApp has not yet met the execution standard its own ambition demands.

The core problem is that My OneApp is being judged with utility-grade expectations from day one — and rightly so, because M-PESA is not a lifestyle feature. It is infrastructure. When the M-PESA Statements screen times out, that is not the equivalent of a Netflix recommendation failing to load. That is the financial record of someone’s economic life becoming temporarily inaccessible. 

When onboarding forces existing users to re-register and start from zero, wiping years of accumulated favourites and saved payees in the process, that is not an inconvenience. That is a breach of the implicit trust contract between a utility and its users. When authentication requires turning off Wi-Fi and switching to Safaricom mobile data, that is not a security feature in the eyes of the multi-SIM Kenyan consumer who runs their data primarily on Airtel. 

It is a message that says: if you are already using us less, we are going to make this harder for you — which is precisely the wrong message to send to the customers most likely to be evaluating whether to use you less permanently.

The Airtel app, by contrast, does not attempt to be WeChat. It does not attempt to be Grab. It attempts to be the best possible version of a mobile operator’s customer-facing app, and within that more modest but entirely honest ambition, it succeeds comprehensively. The navigation is stable, the transaction flows are clear, the receipts are structured like receipts, and the cross-network pragmatism — paying M-PESA tills, sending money to Safaricom subscribers, accepting M-PESA as a funding rail for Airtel products — signals a product philosophy that respects the reality of how Kenyan consumers actually live with their phones rather than the reality that any single operator would prefer them to inhabit.

The Question Kenya’s Digital Payments Market Is Now Being Asked

The strategic question that my two days with Airtel Money has crystallised for me is one that I suspect will define Kenya’s mobile money competitive landscape over the next three to five years. It is not whether Airtel Money can overtake M-PESA — that is not a realistic scenario in the near term, given M-PESA’s 40 million active users and its structural embeddedness in Kenya’s economic infrastructure. The real question is whether Kenya’s consumers actually want a super-app, or whether they want a flawless utility that happens to have optional depth available for those who seek it.

Super apps have worked in specific markets — WeChat in China, Grab and Gojek in Southeast Asia — but those successes were built on base layers that almost never break, in markets with specific regulatory and consumer behaviour contexts that Kenya does not fully replicate. Kenya’s mobile money market is characterized by multi-SIM optimization, price sensitivity, and an increasingly sophisticated consumer base that is making deliberate, data-informed choices about which provider gets which slice of their digital life. In that environment, the winning app may well be the one that respects the user’s mental bandwidth first and sells the ecosystem second — and right now, by that measure, the Airtel app is winning a competition that Safaricom does not yet appear to fully understand it is in.

What I know with certainty after two days is this. I will not be leaving M-PESA. The network effects are too deep, the merchant integration too pervasive, and the social infrastructure too embedded. But I will also not be abandoning Airtel Money. For the first time in the four months it has sat dormant on my phone, I can genuinely see its value — not as a replacement for M-PESA but as a complement to it, an alternative interface for M-PESA transactions, and a genuinely better app experience for daily financial management. That is a more interesting and more commercially significant conclusion than simple platform rivalry. It suggests that the battle for Kenya’s mobile money future may be fought not on the question of which wallet holds your money, but on the question of which app you trust most to help you move it.

Safaricom should be paying very close attention to that question. The OneApp launch suggests, with some urgency, that they currently do not have the right answer. If the trickle-up effect continues to compound the way it has been doing — one Smarta Bundle subscriber, one Airtel Money cashback transaction, one micro-bet’s worth of loyalty at a time — the competitive window available to Safaricom to get that answer right is narrowing faster than their market share figures currently suggest.