Category Archives: mobile banking

Cashless pushes around Africa

Nigeria: The Central Bank of Nigeria set a tariff of 3% for deposits and 2% for withdrawals of  more than Naira 500,000 (equivalent to ~$1,380) from individual accounts. They also set a tariff of 5% for withdrawals from corporate accounts, and 3% for deposits, over Naira 3 Million (equivalent to ~$8,280) from corporate accounts. This is in the states of Lagos, Ogun, Kano, Abia, Anambra, and Rivers States as well as the Federal Capital Territory. This is to promote cashless transactions. (Source)

Uganda: The Bank of Uganda has banned merchants from imposing surcharges for the use of electronic card payments and also the setting of minimum and maxim amounts that can be transacted on cars. In addition, they have asked banks in Uganda to harmonize tariffs that they levy on customers of banks for when they use each other’s ATM’s.

Kenya: Today is the deadline set by Kenya’s Central Bank after which the old series of the Kshs 1,000 (~$10 notes), bearing the image of the first President of Kenya, will cease to become legal  tender for transacting in the country.

Tanzania: Mobile app lender Tala suspended issuing loans in Tanzania. The company which claims to have lent over $1 billion to 4 million individuals will continue in Kenya which they say, with 3 million customers, is a critical part of their global business, and where they are piloting new financial education services. California-headquartered Tala also has customers in The Philippines, Mexico and India, and is backed by investors like PayPal, IVP, and Revolution Growth.

Zimbabwe: The Cashless push has gone awry in Zimbabwe where the Government has now banned Ecocash agents from making cash deposits and withdrawals for customers as these are now happening at values that are at variance. This has resulted in a situation where $1 in cash is worth ~$1.50 in digital money. 

Fintech Moment in East Africa: AmEx FT Pesalink Bitcoin

Recent events in the fintech (financial technology) payment space in East Africa.

Banks

  • The Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) unveiled Pesalink, a digital payments platform that is expected to cut the cost of transactions and transform the way consumers interact with their banks. Pesalink is a fully owned subsidiary of KBA and it will enable customers to make payments between banks in real-time, around the clock, without having to go through intermediaries. It has been approved at Standard Chartered, Co-Operative, Barclays, Commercial Bank of Africa, I&M, Diamond Trust, Gulf African, Guardian, Victoria, Credit, Prime and Middle East banks…“RT @alykhansatchu: .@HabilOlaka says @KenyaBankers will be targeting payments that exceed M-Pesa’s maximum transaction of ($675)”
  • Cooperative Bank: Is a demonstration that the how banks ar moving in the technology space. Kenya’s 3rd bank has adapted to their customers embrace and they enable more customers to use alternative channels for transactions.  They had a valentines’ week promotion to highlight and encourage customers to use alternative channels such as MCo-op Cash (get a loan straight from ones’ phone  at 1.16%  per month and send money to other MCo-op users for free) or at a Co-op Kwa Jirani agent (deposit cash into someone’s Co-op Account for FREE at a Co-op Kwa Jirani agent) or Co-Op cards.
  • KCB will unveil its fintech future – a strategy based on a digital finance  in Q2 of 2017
  • Another is EcoBank which launched a new mobile app which integrates Masterpass QR, a mobile payment solution from MasterCard.  It enables customers to send and receive money instantly across 32 other African countries.

Government

  • National Bank has launched cashlite payment solutions suite for county governments, Ministries, Government Agencies, and Departments. The bank has provided a variety of options for payments including mobile money, smart cards, and e-wallet and cash options, aligned with the continuing growth of mobile technology as well as consumers’ expectations for convenient mobile and online payments.
  • Strathmore University has supplied Busia county government with a revenue collection systems called CountyPro® with which the government hopes to grow revenue by 300%. It caters for all the unstructured county revenue sources including parking, market cess and trailer parking.
  • Mastercard is the technology partner for the Huduma Card in Kenya enabling payments for government services.  It is being issued by Commercial Bank of Africa, Diamond Trust, Equity, and Kenya Commercial banks. Kenyans will be able to pay for an array of enrolled Government services such as the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF), National Social Security Fund (NSSF) amongst others. 

Cards

  • mVisa will soon be in 10 countries as Visa expands its QR payment service for safe and easy mobile payments in emerging markets. It is already live in India, Kenya (started with Family Bank) and Rwanda, and will soon be available to merchants and consumers in Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam.. (mVisa) allows consumers to use their mobile phones to make cashless purchases at merchant outlets, pay bills remotely and even send money to friends and family members by securely linking their Visa debit, credit or prepaid account to the mVisa application. Also any bank’s mVisa customer – regardless of where they bank – can transact on any mVisa merchant and merchants do not need to invest in POS infrastructure. Visa has partnered with Co-Operative, Family, KCB, and NIC banks.
  • Mastercard committed to financially include 100,000 Kenyan micro merchants with Masterpass QR, a simple and secure digital payment solution. It will be introduced through various financial institutions. With it, consumers will be able to pay for in-store purchases by scanning the QR (Quick Response) code displayed at the checkout on their smartphones, or by entering a merchant identifier into their feature phones. Masterpass QR is currently being rolled out in Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania.
  • Safaricom has issued 16,000 Lipa na M-Pesa cards in the pilot phase of a project that will launch later in the year. The Lipa na M-Pesa card uses pin and chip technology…It is also equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) (which will) increases the speed at which customers make payments.
  • Verve: A dozen Kenya banks have partnered with Verve International, Africa’s leading low-cost payment network provider, in their push towards interconnectivity, cardless transact ability, and digital payments. Verve, best known as a card issuer has more than 32 million Verve cards and virtual/digital tokens issued across Africa and Verve is used in 19 African countries.
  • Pesapal adds American Express ​Pesapal integrated American Express into its payment platform on February 27, and  AmEx card holders can now use their cards to​ ​transact on any online payment portal that uses Pesapal. This is especially useful for hotels and other companies in the East African tourism space.  Pesapal which is in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Malawi and plans to expand to Nigeria in 2018 also offers an online booking engine for Hotels called ReservePort that’s used by Serena and Heritage brands.

Remittances

  • Facebook:  Facebook added international money transfers to its chat app. The service comes via London-based startup TransferWise in the form of a Facebook Messenger chatbot and enables transfers to and from the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Europe.
  • Bitpesa:  The company introduced an Africa to China corridor enabling users to send payments from Africa, directly to a Chinese bank account using bitcoin.
  • European choice: How much does it cost to send money from Germany to Kenya?@WehliyeMohamed posted that the global average cost for sending $200 in Q3 2016 was 7.42%, and that It cost him 6.7% to send money to Kenya. Then @MkenyaU answered that it costs 1.5% when he sends €200 from Germany and this reduces to 0.6% when he sends €500. He cautioned that some companies charge zero fees but their exchange rates are horrible as he shared a comparison of a dozen services available to send money from Germany to Kenya.

 

Mobile

  • Safaricom Mpesa: 10-year-old M-Pesa had 6 billion transactions in 2016 and is now in 10 countries – Albania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Romania, and Tanzania. A new feature in M-Pesa will enable users to see the cost of transactions. In the initial phase, customers will be notified of the costs after, and in the second phase customers will receive a pop up message informing them of any charges prior to the transactions, while the third phase will see the service being made available to value-added M-PESA financial products including M-Shwari, KCB M-PESA, Okoa Stima and M-Tiba. The second and third phases of the update will be rolled out in coming months.
  • There have been some calls and reports recommending that M-Pesa be split from Safaricom. This could have happened years ago, but it is more difficult now that M-Pesa is an entrenched and central part of Safaricom today.
  • Tala raised over $30 million in Series B financing, led by IVP and joined by Ribbit Capital.   Tala uses smartphone data to build financial identity ..  mobile app for Android aggregates more than 10,000 different data points on a customer’s device, including financial transactions, savings, network diversity, and geographic patterns, and builds a customized credit score, or financial identity. Tala operates in East Africa and Southeast Asia with its main top markets being Kenya and the Philippines. Tala has delivered more than one million loans totaling over $50 million, and more than one million individuals have accessed the product in East Africa alone. See how Tala compares to other (fintech) / phone-lending apps in Kenya.  Forbes termed this the largest Series B raised by a woman founder in recent memory.
  •  Zeep is a smart and simple mobile platform that helps young people (teens) nurture good financial habits. They ‘learn by doing’ within the framework of a secure financial environment with guidance from their parents.

Companies to watch

Irish Tech News released a list of 38 Kenya fintech companies to watch in 2017; these include Abacus, BitPesa, Branch, Cellulant, Chura, FarmDrive, Kopo Kopo, M-Changa, Pesapal, Tala, and Umati.

Summit

The FT Africa Payments Innovation Summit will take place on 29 March 2017..it will bring together 250 business leaders from various mobile and financial interest groups and explore challenges and opportunities inherent in these developments: from providing greater financial access to un-banked people across the continent to providing new services and opportunities for an emerging middle class.

5 Reasons not to link your Bank and Mobile money accounts

Safaricom, the mobile money market leader with M-Pesa with 19 million customers has partnerships with 30 banks and 160 financial institutions as per their 2014 annual report that notes The new (API) platform (launched in January 2014) helped streamline operations for businesses that disburse staff salaries through M-PESA, as well as those that receive payments through M-PESA and need to move cash to their bank accounts on a regular basis. 

It seems to  very convenient to link your bank to your mobile money account – so that you can top-up your mobile money account. More so when you really need it in an emergency, or late at night or when on the road far away from any mobile money agent – but with just a few clicks on your phone, you get the cash you need to facilitate whatever need.

But there are some issues to consider about having the convenience of drawing cash from your bank account sraight on to your phone.

1. It drains savings. Looking at my M-Pesa statement at the Selfcare page on the Safaricom site, most of the activity that I use M-Pesa for is for payments out. All deposits are made with a purpose, usually to pay out a corresponding amount soon after either as remittance, utility bills, airtime, meals, repairs etc.  It is easier to pay out money than build savings, and there are few savings options like M-Shwari, compared to the hundreds of expense item ones.

2. It is costly, with banks charging about $1 (Kshs 75-250) for customers to tap their phones and do the transfer from bank to mobile money. It costs much less, or is free to withdrawal cash from a bank ATM and deposit it at a mobile money agent.

3. Customers inevitably have things go wrong with their bank accounts – from misplaced funds to banks changing their terms or costs. What is  a transaction fails? or money  is sent to the wrong payee? Who do you complain to? You’re better off dealing  with customer service at one or the other, but not at both a mobile company and a bank

4. Banks may have less trust than telcos in terms of being custodians of small amounts of funds.

.. if you leave Kshs 1,000 (~$12) in your M-Pesa account it will be there until you use it, with no phantom charges eating it away (it won’t stay in your phone for 6 months). But if you leave the same Kshs 1,000 in your bank account for a few months, the money will be exhausted by various tariffs like ledger fees, dormant account fees, minimum balance fees and the account will be drained out and shut down.

5. Banks change their terms and conditions too often. M-Pesa tariffs were revised again this week after almost two years in a  very public way. Yet banks make several changes and don’t even inform customers till they see they stumble on new charges on their statements, or go to the bank and find that a service has been cancelled or changed.

Mobile Money Tithing

Last week Family Bank announced the launch of a new product called M-Kanisa which allows church faithful to send their tithes and contributions to their Churches via mobile phone.  It works with Safaricom’s M-Pesa’s paybill and offers convenience and speed for church members who need to meet their tithing obligations to their churches or institutions.

For the church, it needs to open a bank account and share the paybill account with their congregation and the Church will also get Immediate notification via SMS when tithes and offerings are deposited into the account.

Another mobile money church service, discovered via Twitter, is ZionCell which works on the Airtel Money from rival provider Airtel. With this one, Church members can also sign up for insurance cover, receive daily devotional messages, health & financial messages and there are additional benefits of merchant account discounts and a Zioncell debit card. Their site appears to show that almost 3,000 different churches, affiliated to the Kenya Assemblies of God, and the Deliverance Church, are signed onto Zioncell.

EDIT From Swaziland, here’s a link to a story about a tithe contribution arrangement between MTN and two local church groups.

M-Pesa as a low cost bank account

Safaricom have extended the registration deadline for m-pesa divided payments via cell phone to today – October 15. Over 465,000 of their shareholders own less than 1,000 shares, and will get a dividend payment of less than 100 shillings ($1.31), with most in this category likely to get about shillings, assuming they have not bought any shares since the IPO allocations.

M-Pesa’s latest offering
During the dividend registration process, Safaricom has clarified that shareholders receiving dividends of less than 100 shillings will only be able to buy airtime with this, while those with larger dividends will be able to withdraw the cash, pay bills, send it to other people etc.

All this brings up the question that has been asked several times, most recently by research group – CGAP in the blog post cell phone bank accounts as an incentive to save money. If you compare holding cash in an m-pesa account, you are able to gain comparable benefits to low cost bank accounts offered at several leading local banks – and can use banks for those services that M-pesa or Zap (from Zain) don’t have e.g. withdraw cash via m-pesa, and go to Equity Bank and buy a banker’s cheque for 50/=

Benefits of m-pesa banking
– 24 hour banking: More reach & access than any bank or ATM network
– Mobile banking with operator tends to be cheaper then mobile banking via bank provided services
– Saving in transport costs and banking transaction costs
– Can pay a variety of bills for utilities at a low cost
Challenges of m-pesa banking
– Lack of float at dealers to transact/occasional mpesa system downtime
– No credit history; and the clumsy expensive statement from Safaricom not useful yet
– Calls for discipline to build savings
– Funds are not insured, and are more prone to crime. And dealing with a stolen phone in Kenya is not a pleasant experience.

Anyone tried to use m-pesa as their main bank a/c?