One of the reasons that Safaricom’s MPESA has seen a rise over the years has been greatly due to having a large number of mobile money agents and merchants throughout the country as compared to the other telcos.
However, this will soon stop being the case as Safaricom, Airtel, and Telkom are now set to share mobile money agents and merchants in the next phase of mobile interoperability, a move that experts say, will foster healthy competition.
This will allow agents to maintain a single float when serving customers, regardless of their network. Agent interoperability will be a big advantage to both Airtel and Telkom as they would have access to MPESA’s over 400,000 agents and merchants countrywide.
According to Julius Cheptiony, Telkom Kenya chief strategy and business development officer, the opening of till and paybill access by Safaricom will be an advantage to Telkom and Airtel customers.
“In the fullness of time, we want to make this (referring to mPesa pay bill service) a reality, we want to make sure that customers can walk to any agent or merchant and transact,” Cheptiony said.
Ashish Malhotra, the managing director of Airtel Networks Kenya said that interoperability makes them a complete operator. “We’ve had voice and data services that we were playing in and now accessing over 400,000 merchants across Kenya gives us the chance to offer all possible services,” said Malhotra.
Airtel and Telkom recently acquired access to allow their mobile money customers to make payments to the MPESA paybill. This was the secondary phase of mobile-money integration which had earlier in the year seen customers of the two players access payments on M-Pesa tills.
According to Boniface Mungania, Safaricom’s interim chief financial services, the operators are working to further broaden choice in the next phase of interoperability which will be the “full interoperability”.
When it takes place, it is expected to provide a fair playing field for all service providers with competition now being driven by product and service offerings – customers will continue to be limited to the network they were on in order to make payments and have to resort to alternative methods that were neither customer friendly nor affordable.
Central Bank of Kenya reiterates that full interoperability will facilitate the deepening of the digitalisation of payments, increasing choice, affordability and customer-centricity of payment services, a key outcome outlined in the National Payments Strategy 2022-2025.
