In Kenya today, M-Pesa delays are common occurrences with the mobile platform being the dominant service for money transfer, 10 minutes to an hour to even 24 hrs are worth waiting to a subscriber who needs to make a transaction.
This is however about to be history probably later this year since the telecommunications firm has contracted 200 experts from Chinese tech giant Huawei to install a new M-Pesa server that will be located in Kenya. This will prompt minimal service outages that occur whenever the undersea fibre optic cable is damaged which also calls for cost saving since Safaricom will now be in charge of maintenance of the services as opposed to currently when it pays fees to Vodafone.
Today M-Pesa has taken over the banking industry having introduced services that bring the bank to your phone literally, in case of an M-Pesa delay, businesses get affected in a big way as well as personal errands as if there was never a similar platform before the birth of Safaricom’s major contributor. With a limit of ksh140,000 a day, money transfer couldn’t be any better especially to Small and Medium enterprises.
Currently, Safaricom pays between 10 and 25 percent of revenues generated through M-Pesa as royalty fees, the company will however be paying a lesser amount after the systems are locally rooted which could benefit the subscriber too with possibilities of reduced transaction fees.
Meant to be a person to person mobile money transfer service when it kicked off, M-Pesa currently serves more than 650 institutions.