M-Pesa Debuts Bill Pay Tool for Airtel, Telkom Customers

African money transfer service M-Pesa has debuted bill pay interoperability that lets Airtel and Telkom customers make mobile money payments directly into Safaricom’s M-PESA Pay Bill Numbers.

The move comes in the wake of the company’s announcement in April that allowed Kenyans to make mobile money payments to M-PESA Buy Goods and Services Tills from any network, Tech Moran reported Friday (July 15).

“This innovation extends even more convenience to customers and businesses, transforming M-PESA into a one-stop solution to send and receive money and payments from any financial service locally, and our global partners,” said Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa in the report.

The report noted that the goal here is to boost the adoption and convenience of cash payments in Kenya.

Last month, M-Pesa announced a partnership with Visa on a virtual payment card service aimed at the country’s subscription market for services like Spotify and Netflix.

Read more: M-Pesa Partners With Visa for Virtual Card Payments in Africa

Dubbed the M-Pesa Global Pay Visa Virtual Card, it will let users pay merchants from their mobile phones, with no need for credit cards or accounts with services like PayPal. The card is available for over 30 million M-Pesa users in Kenya, with plans to roll the program out in Tanzania, Mozambique, Congo, Lesotho and Ghana by April next year.

Speaking to PYMNTS last month, Ndegwa called M-Pesa “a barometer of what’s happening in the [Kenyan] economy and how customers are behaving.”

See more: Safaricom CEO Says ‘Innovation Mindset’ Critical to M-Pesa Success

That description is an apt way of illustrating the local dominance of the company’s mobile money transfer service, thought to be one of the most successful mobile payment systems in Africa — if not the world.

After the pandemic, there was a 20% rise in the M-Pesa wallet size as customers began saving more due to the uncertainty surrounding the crisis. But as time went on and the firm waived fees on transactions below $10, the number of transactions per customer shot up from nine to 18.

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