Both of Jazz’s fintech offerings, JazzCash and Mobilink Microfinance Bank, delivered strong top line growth and so their EBITDA margins expand. Jazz’s 4G penetration reached 61% of its customer base, enabling the addition of further multiplay users who accounted for 25% of the operator’s monthly active users. With JazzCash, Pakistan’s most popular financial services app; and Tamasha, the country’s leading video streaming app, Jazz is a good illustration of how our digital operator strategy is succeeding and creating growth. All our product offerings from financial services have positive unit economics, from strong underlying growth. During COVID, Jazz offered free usage for its services, which led to negative unit economics, which we have now ended.
This explains why USSD users went from 9.5 million to 7 million. However, we cherish the fact that Jazz mobile app users grew from 7.8 million to 8.5 million. Many of you are likely familiar with Safaricom’s M-PESA, and its growth, how it transformed Kenya. I wanted to focus your attention on two things here. First, we are still in the infancy in penetration of digital financial services in Pakistan at around 6% versus 58% in Kenya. And secondly, take a look at the last line, transaction value versus GDP. Pakistan is at 0.06x where Kenya is already at 2.5x, an order of magnitude of almost 42x. This is despite the fact that Pakistan population is over 4x larger. We are at the earliest innings of helping transform Pakistan’s digital economy already EBITDA and cash positive businesses.
Let’s switch to Tamasha, which is now recognized in the country as the best digital platform for entertainment. Tamasha is open to all mobile users. 63.4% of its user base are actually non-Jazz customers. At the same time, the Jazz customers that watch Tamasha have an ARPU that is 2.7x higher than our single voice customers. By bringing original and exclusive content that is relevant to our customers in Pakistan, Jazz and Tamasha are able to drive more individuals to use data and more multiplay offerings that drive higher revenue performance. Moving on to Kazakhstan, Beeline Kazakhstan remains Kazakhstan’s leading operator in terms of Net Promoter Score and continues to gain market share. This contributed 18% year-on-year local currency revenue growth, with service revenues up 19% year-on-year.
Beeline Kazakhstan’s strong performance continues to be driven by higher ARPU with consistent growth in the 4G data user base and consumption of data and digital services. 4G penetration was at 73% in the third quarter and multiplay users represented 42% of monthly active users. These customers consume Beeline Kazakhstan’s digital services such as BeeTV, Simply financial services product, IZI, hitter, and they account for 60% of subscriber revenues in the third quarter. Let me speak about IZI, which is Kazakhstan’s first digital operator. Users of the IZI app continue to grow reaching almost 0.5 million monthly active users in Q3. Their year-on-year growth is 4.3x, just under a half of IZI users are non-Beeline customers, while the remainder also have an IZI sim card and power their connectivity in addition to entertainment services they consume.
Monthly active mobile customers rose 59.1% year-on-year to 219,000 in the third quarter, and IZI users who enjoy the digital experience of the entertainment super app have an ARPU over 4.4x higher compared to the ARPU of IZI customers who do not consume entertainment content. In Bangladesh, Banglalink revenues rose 15.1% in the third quarter. The company’s sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth and tripling the average growth of the competition. Growing market share and ongoing investment in the Banglalink network drove EBITDA up almost 19% in third quarter. Banglalink’s strong focus on cost control and inflationary pricing helped deliver this impressive result, even as the electricity and fuel costs continue to rise. Banglalink’s total subscriber base reached almost 40 million by the end of the second quarter, rising 8% year-on-year.
Banglalink’s 4G penetration continue to rise as a result of investment into its expanding network with the share of 4G users up by 9 percentage points year-on-year and almost 20 million. This represents 49% of the total subscriber base, a growth still to come. 4G rollout combined with Banglalink’s digital services portfolio helped deliver a 56.1% year-on-year rise in multiplay users and 62.3% year-on-year growth in multiplay revenues. Last but not least, let me share that we have sold nearly one-third of our tower portfolio in Bangladesh. This is a sign that we are committed to our strategy of being asset-light. Expect us to continue delivering on unlocking greater value from our portfolio of both physical and digital assets. Toffee is part of Banglalink’s digital operator offering and the country’s leading entertainment platform.
Toffee continues to maintain a healthy user base with monthly active users reaching 12.2 million in the third quarter, up 72.2% year-on-year. Toffee is another example of VEON operating company’s digital service that is available to all mobile customers in the country, and 70% of Banglalink users have not even tried Toffee, but this application is being consumed by the competition customers. Toffee customers continue to make the most of platform’s wide variety of streaming content with the local total number of sessions watched up 31% year-on-year. Banglalink customers who use Toffee generate 2.6x the ARPU of a single play voice customer, which continuously illustrate the value of the offering. Turning now to Beeline Uzbekistan. In the third quarter, Beeline Uzbekistan achieved 15.6% year-on-year local currency top line growth.
This performance was driven by the combination of expansion in the customer base and higher ARPU, as well as double digit increases in 4G users and data usage. Beeline Uzbekistan now exceeds our 70% 4G penetration target with 71% of the customer base using 4G. Data consumption rose almost 30% on the back of the increase in 4G users. The year-on-year decrease in EBITDA in the third quarter was impacted by one-off factors in Q3 2022 and Q3 2023. Adjusting for those, Beeline Uzbekistan would’ve reported EBITDA growth of 10% year-on-year. For the last two years, we spoke a lot about the digital operator strategy. In the next few slides, I will go in some detail as you have requested to show you what we have built and continuing to build. There are four key additional verticals from our existing self-care applications: education, healthcare, entertainment, and financial services.
