Kenya’s leading telecom provider Safaricom announced on Tuesday that it was upgrading its mobile money platform M-PESA, hoping to make doing financial transactions wirelessly a bit easier.
According to the company, the new system “will enable users to make instant payments for corporate services”.
Other mobile service providers in the country have called on Safaricom to allow them access to the platform, and have repeatedly said they would be willing to pay royalties to the company. Safaricom has thus far refused.
“It will also save customers inconveniences such as disconnections that occur as the current platform reconciles the transactions,” the company continued, adding that the new service would reduce the time it takes to make bill payments.
“It takes 48 hours for payments made to Kenya Power for instance, to reflect on the electricity distributor’s systems, while those to the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) take 76 hours,” the company added.
The new service will also provide users the ability to use the mobile money platform to pay for items online instantly, instead of having to be forced to wait until payments clear.
Safaricom also added that in order to reduce costs, part of the M-Pesa servers in Germany would be relocated to Kenya in order to improve “the reliability of the mobile money platform and cut down on overheads”.
Joseph Mayton
not bad…
Doing it Big..making kenya Proud.