Afrigather Safaricom, Kenya’s main telco, will now not permit prospects to ship cash to unregistered people on M-PESA, its cellular cash service. The transfer can even have an effect on unregistered cellular cash customers on Airtel Cash and T-Kash. T-Kash is a cellular cash product run by Kenya’s third-largest operator, Telkom.
Per a press release shared by the provider on its X account, M-PESA customers “will now not be capable to ship and obtain cash throughout completely different cellular cash suppliers corresponding to Airtel and T-Kash.”
Prior to now, M-PESA allowed prospects to ship cash to unregistered Safaricom prospects. Clients with out registered M-PESA accounts are thought of unregistered.
Whereas M-PESA didn’t clarify the explanation for as we speak’s rule change, one concept is that it’s linked to safety. Unregistered SIM playing cards permit the motion of cellular cash which are typically untraceable.
Within the final three years, state companies have tried to handle M-PESA’s dominance in Kenya. Cell cash subscriptions, which stood at 38.1 million in September 2023, are primarily led by Safaricom’s M-PESA. In Q2 2023, M-PESA’s market share was at 96.5%, adopted by Airtel Cash at 3.4%, and T-Kash at 0.1%.
Amid calls to declare M-PESA a dominant player available in the market, the Central Financial institution of Kenya (CBK) known as for cellular cash interoperability; in addition to sending cash throughout the platforms, service provider and paybill providers had been additionally made interoperable in 2022. Nevertheless, the adjustments haven’t accelerated the adoption of Airtel Cash and T-Kash, probably due to their small company community (the place prospects go to withdraw and deposit money).
M-PESA has additionally been fighting inconsistent service availability over the previous couple of days amid buyer complaints throughout a number of social media platforms. The telco has not been upfront about the reason for the outages, a departure from its customer-first coverage that made it a sexy operator to thousands and thousands of Kenyans.
