Category Archives: M-Pesa

Barclays Timiza launched

On Friday, Barclays unveiled Timiza, its virtual banking strategy to extend its growth and services to the mobile space.

It comes after two other banks CBA (through M-Shwari) and KCB have also extended virtual services over Safaricom and M-Pesa to reach millions more digital customers and borrowers.

Timiza is immediately available to all M-Pesa customers (they are 27.8 million) who are either Barclays customers and non-customers. Timiza has a simple registration by dialing *848# or downloading the app from the google store and entering a national ID and phone number and within minutes of creating a new password, one can see their credit limit and start borrowing. The minimum loan amount is Kshs 50, and maximum Kshs 1 million, though it’s really up to 150,000 (~$1,500) depending on one’s credit rating and funds are immediately sent to one’s Timiza wallet (not M-pesa). For demonstration, a loan of Kshs 1,000 (~$10) for 30 days attracts a fee of 1.17% plus a facility fee of 5%, for a repayment of Kshs 1061.67

Besides being an easy and low-interest loan avenue, Timiza also offers a simple current account, savings account, fixed deposit account (term deposits of 1, 3, 6, 12 months – minimum Kshs 1,000. no top-up), group savings accounts, and channels for utility payments. One can also purchase insurance (a whole life cover policy) in the app.

A few months ago when M-Shwari was marking five years since its launch, CBA announced they would have variable pricing for good-repayers and a rebate on fees for people who paid loans within 10 days. These have not been done, but there are hints of such revisions in Timiza

Other Timiza Notes

The Timiza T&C‘s mostly relate to the use of personal information and clauses on resolving disputed. But they also have some interesting things:

  • There are no fees for transfers between Timiza and M-pesa
  • Barclays may suspend a Timiza account and credit if they discover it is being used for fraud or illegal activities, and they may also suspend them if they become aware that a customer is defaulting on other loans.
  • Unique from M-Shwari in that the loans can be rolled-over, and there will be a “roll-over” fee levied. However, the staff at Barclays branches have no authority to alter Timiza agreements. 
  • Timiza users will be eligible  for store finance at Barclays-selected merchants
  • One can select the period for repayment of a loan when applying for a loan  – maximum of 30 days

Barclays has 88 branches which are located in 38 of Kenya’s 47 counties and says they are responding to their customers preference for more mobile and internet banking channels. Barclays targets to get 5 million new customers in the next five years.

$1=Kshs 101

Huawei Mate 10 Kenya Launch

Huawei has launched its Mate 10, a premium phone in Kenya in conjunction with e-commerce platform Jumia. The company which now sells 140 million phones a year, and aims to power past Samsung and Apple in the global phone sales race, has been in Kenya for 19 years powering base-stations, communications, surveillance, and fibre networks, devices and systems including M-Pesa and will next do intelligent traffic lights starting in Nairobi.

Huwaei’s traditions of innovation, research, engineering, patents and new technology are all seen in the Huawei Mate 10 which is compact than its Mate 9 predecessor, but with the same screen size. The Huawei Mate 10 runs on Android 8.0 and is powered by the Kirin 970, a powerful Huawei-made chipset which enables the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for the phone to study the phone user’s habits, and predicts future usage and allocates phone resources to enhance the user experience.

The AI also allows real-time translation on the phone, by voice or of documents, by taking a picture (e.g. of a page of Chinese text) of 50 languages (and counting). This happens on the phone, not in the cloud, and this provides better privacy & security for the user, minimizes data usage and is faster. Huawei has a partnership with camera maker Leica that has seen them enhance photography capabilities; e.g. the Mate 10 camera recognizes millions of images of people, scenes and objects like food being photographed and optimizes the settings to produce better pictures from the combination of two 20X and 12X cameras.

For practical use in many markets, the Mate 10 is a dual SIM phone capable of holding two 4G SIM cards, and the new powerful battery will easily last two days with normal use despite the large screen and fast processing speeds – and a quick charge of the phone for just 20 minutes should be enough to get a full day of use. The Mate 10 has a curved back for easy grip and is spill and dust resistant.

The Mate 10 can be plugged into a screen to work like a desktop for the user to make edits and show items like demos and presentations right from the phone. The split-screen allows true multitasking of functions and the user can still take calls or check social media while working on other projects.

The Mate 10 phone is now available exclusively on Jumia for Kshs 79,999  (~$775) and for the Black Friday sale period, Jumia is offering a free power bank and a Kshs 2,000 shopper voucher. In the coming weeks, there will be more variants of the Mate 10 offered on Jumia, at Safaricom shops and the open market including the Mate 10 Lite phone that will retail for about $500.

Nairobi Supermarket Shoppers and Economics Trends

Chris (@blackorwa) has a blog on Kenya supermarket buyers, deciphering consumer patterns and habits of Nairobi shoppers by analyzing and decoding their discarded supermarket receipts.  This is an interesting experiment, in which they actually paid street kids to dig and dive for recipes in the garbage. They based their search for trends on a previous study at Walmart to draw out patterns of shoppers.

some interesting findings

  • Supermarkets not within malls have 61%  of their customers buying less than 3 items and spending Kshs 200 (~$2) on average.
  • M-PESA is yet to dominate retail – it was used for just 3.6% of supermarket transactions, with cards (credit/debit) used for 1.8% of transactions – as cash is still king at supermarkets. Safari com hopes to change that with 1tap which makes it faster to make purchases.
  • On a typical weekday, a small well-positioned supermarket does 2,350 transactions with a value of about Kshs 360,000. This translates to about Kshs 10.8 million in revenue a month.
  • Margins are thin, and supermarket profits are determined by controlling labour expenses.
  • Cooked food, mineral water, and bakery drive a lot of sales – they have the highest sales volume and greatest profit margins.

Take a look at the study.

Safaricom Governance Changes

Appearing in today’s newspaper was a notice for the Safaricom shareholders annual general meeting (AGM) that will take place on September 1. In addition to the usual shareholder resolutions, there are additional matters that will be approved, mainly relating to governance by at Safaricom. This all follows the buyout of UK’s Vodafone stake in Safaricom, by South African Vodacom in an internal Vodafone group corporate realignment earlier this year that has now been completed.  A running theme seems to be to entrench Kenyan citizens in the governance and influence at what is now Kenya’s most valuable company.

Some of the changes:

  • The company Chairman shall be a Kenyan (this is now going to be mandatory and is spelt out in the company’s articles of association)
  • Directors shall encourage retention of a “Kenyan character” in the senior management and executive committees of Safaricom.
  • The articles are also changed to spell out that that the independent non-executive directors of Safaricom, shall all be Kenyan citizens.
  • The position of Deputy Chairman is eliminated.
  • Directors appointed by Vodafone shall be excluded from voting on agreements relating to M-Pesa.
  • Directors appointed by Vodafone are to vote in the interest of the company (Safaricom) if its growth and investment decision clash with those of Vodafone.
  • Directors shall appoint the Managing Director Previously as indicated in documents from the Safaricom IPO, Vodafone directors had veto power over the appointment over approval of business plans, annual budgets, the appointment of the Managing Director (Chief Executive Officer) and appointment of the Financial Director (Chief Financial Officer). Now, the Safaricom articles will change to read that “75% directors must approve these provisions” including a new one of “any material change to the company brand”. Shareholders at the AGM will also approve a name change of the company to “Safaricom PLC” in compliance with Kenya’s new companies law for listed companies to be “PLC”

EDIT: At the 2019 AGM, held on August 30 in Nairobi, shareholders will be asked to approve a special resolution to amend the maximum number of directors to be 11, not 10, and have a majority of independent directors be Kenyan. The announcement comes a few weeks after Bob Collymore, the Company’s long-serving CEO, passed away. His predecessor, Michael Joseph has been appointed to serve as interim CEO until the Board picks a successor to Collymore.

M-Akiba Reloaded: More government bonds via phone

On Friday the Treasury Cabinet Secretary launched the second tranche of M-Akiba, the government bonds that can be bought and traded via mobile phone. 

The first tranche of M-Akiba, worth Kshs 150 million was launched in March 2017, and marked at 10%, maturing in April 2020. They had their highest trading day on May 12 when about Kshs 345,000 was traded; usually, about Kshs 100,000 per day ($1,000) of M-Akiba are traded by investors so far. At the time of launch, the indication was that another Kshs 4.85 billion was to be raised in June 2017.

The new M-Akiba infrastructure bond issue (MAB2/2017/3) is targeting Kshs 1 billion (~$9.7 million), with a green shoe option to raise another Kshs 3.85 billion. These are also three-year infrastructure bonds (dated 24 July), paying 10% per annum, with interest paid every six months, and the minimum investment is, again, Kshs 3,000 (~$29). Payments for the new bonds will be done on mobile money such as M-pesa (by dialing *889#) as well as through Pesalink – a new service from Kenya banks that allows their customers to make payments via phone and mobile money transfers of up to Kshs 1 million  (~$9,700) per day – which is seven times greater than what they can do with mobile money, under current banking rules (set to prevent money-laundering). The deadline for investors to apply for the M-Akiba bond is July 21, and the trading commission for will be 0.1% of allocations.

EDIT (July 23 Nation): MAB2/2017/3 has been extended to 8th September and the bond will start trading on 12th September. It has been reported that investors bought Kshs 128 million before the initial deadline, and the newspaper notice of the extension mentions that these invests will be paid for interest earned between July 24 and 11th September.

EDIT February 22, 2019: A new tranche of M-Akiba bonds will be on sale from February 25 to March 8, 2019, with the Treasury targeting to raise Kshs 250 million by offering investors 10% interest. The bond targets investors who can put in as low as Sh3,000 via their mobile phones then lock it in for a period of three years. They then earn interest after every six months and principal amount upon reaching maturity date. Those wishing to exit early can do so through Nairobi Securities Exchange where the bond will trade on the secondary market. 

‘Akiba’ means ‘savings’ in Swahili.
$1 = Ksh 103