Orange O-Money in Town as Equity Bank play Double Agent

Orange Kenya has partnered with Kenya’s Equity Bank to offer its customers a mobile money transfer service. The service will run on Equity Bank’s money transfer platform, Easy 24/7.  O- Money will allow customers to send money to any mobile network, with multiple transactions per day allowed up to a limit of Ksh. 100,000.

Here are what you can do with O-Money from your mobile phone:

• request bank loans,
• make interbank money transfers,
• withdraw or send cash,
• send cash.

Great but this sounds like something we have heard before from Equity? Do you remember M-Kesho?

For Orange it is straight forward, they need this to compete with the likes of Safaricom Mpesa,  Bharti Airtel Zap and YuCash but for Equity …what? Double agent? I like this.  The O-Money Orange Kenya equity Bank partnership is exactly like the Mkesho..Safaricom Equity Bank Partnership.  It will be interesting to see how  Equity Bank   market the  service which is identical to Mkesho to the public.  Remember majority of Kenyans are already using Mpesa, and by extension Mkesho.

Mobile Stats in Kenya by Dec 2009

• 20 million mobile phone users
• Safaricom 15 million subscribers roughly 78 %
• Zain 14% around 2.8 million subscibers
• Orange 4% around 0.8 million subscribers
• Yu 1% roughly 0.2 million subscribers