Both banking institutions and mobile banking platforms have been under pressure from the business regulator, Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), to make transparent ALL of their charges to the consumer. It is for this reason that Safaricom Limited is updating its mobile money transfer service, M-Pesa, to be in line with the regulators directive.
“As we align with recommendations made by the Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK), we hope that this latest innovation will enhance the customer experience on the M-PESA platform. This follows a number of proactive enhancements we have delivered on M-PESA such as Hakikisha which have reduced the number of erroneous transactions.”
-Stephen Chege, Director, Corporate Affairs, Safaricom
Safaricom will roll out this update in three phases. The first phase will be going live this week. The charges to be included in this phase include:
- You will now be able to know beforehand the cost of a transaction before you go through with it. The M-Pesa confirmation message will now also display the charges to be accrued for that specific transaction. This will be in addition to the name check feature, Hakikisha that was previously rolled out.
The second phase will include a pop up feature that will display a notification informing the customer of any charges to expect prior to the transaction.
The third and final phase will see the feature roll out to the other M-Pesa value-added financial products. After this phase, you will be able to make use of the feature from M-Shwari, KCB M-Pesa, Okoa Stima and M-Tiba.
It is worth noting that you could still access this feature through the USSD code *234# or use the web calculator apps from the Safaricom website. The downside of these two methods is that the experience is wanting. You have to carry out the query before heading over to your M-Pesa menu to initiate the transaction. With the update of the app, the response is in real time right integrated into the M-Pesa menu.
