It is almost impossible to have a discussion these days about electronic money transfer without M-Pesa sneaking into your conversation somehow. The mobile money transfer system has been championed world wide as a revolutionary platform and a trend setter worldwide. And it should be. With 39,000 outlets and 14.9 million customers they are easily the largest money transfer platform in the region. Not to mention the estimates that M-Pesa moves more or less 2 billion shillings a day. M-Pesa has led the pack in classic David Rudisha fashion; always ahead of the curve.

An article here gave a long and detailed argument as to why we should just forget the common currency and basic use the M-Pesa platform to promote inter country trading. Later in the story he went on to say how the word M-Pesa was used to describe a form of payment, not the brand; akin to saying “Nipatie ile Blue Band ya prestige” or something along those lines. It was taken as  such, a little laughs, a light pat on the back; and life moves on.

Yet the pure choice to use M-Pesa to brand the whole mobile money sector is the problem in itself. With the excitement behind the digital age dying down investors are now getting ripe to ask for returns on the millions they invested in the digital world. Facebook has been forced to find ways to maximise their monetisation and fast. Online marketing is being pushed to the limit and Social media strategists are being made to show exactly how their strategies are affecting the bottom line of the company.

And Kenya is not far behind. The developers and techies in the Sillicon Savana are under pressure from the funds and venture capitalists to move away from free, useful apps and to monetize somehow. With this in mind many techies are creating apps that run on M-Pesa as a payment platform. Scratch that, they are making apps completely founded on M-Pesa. And, given the numbers, above it makes perfect sense.

And these apps are being downloaded and used by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands. They are helping M-Pesa grow their customer base year on year. They are helping create an M-Pesa that can’t fail. The impact on our society will be too great. What platform will handle those loose billions?  No, M-Pesa can only grow. And that’s a scary thought.

As this article put it in many technical finance like terms is that the issue with having a banking institution that is too big to fail is that at some point it will be too big to save. It could be argued that this is still a small percentage of the amount of money that Kenyans move every day. And it’s true, it is miniscule. Then again so was the hole in the dam wall that the little Dutch boy was famed for sticking his finger in.