Safaricom has an ongoing promotion that seeks to drive growth of mobile money payments usage. The campaign dubbed “Lipa Na M-Pesa Shinda A Home” has a three pronged approach where motorists who fuel their cars get instant rewards of talk-time to their phones upon purchase of fuel of Kshs 500 and above using Lipa Na M-pesa service. This has seen over 134,000 motorists get rewarded for the time this has been on going.
There are participating fuel stations, and they are as follows: Total Kenya fuel stations, Vivo Kenya (shell), Oil Lybya, Kenol Kobil, Gulf Energy, Pima Gas Dealers, Hashi, Galana Oil (Delta Stations), National Oil and Engen.
The second approach is for anyone who uses Lipa na M-pesa to either make payments when buying goods, pay utilities or even transfer money to the bank from the mobile money wallet M-pesa. Safaricom has announced that there will be a house to be won every week during the promotion period. The telco today handed over the first two houses to their respective winners. There is also a total of Kshs 32 Million cash and Kshs 16 million worth of airtime to be won by consumers in the promotion.
Speaking during the handover ceremony for the winners of the first round of its “Lipa Na M-PESA Shinda A Home” subscriber competition, Betty Mwangi, General Manager, Financial Services, Safaricom said that the fact that the service had witnessed such traction meant that it was quickly gaining acceptance as the preferred payment channel in Kenya.
“When distilled further, the statistics indicate that the majority of non-cash transactions are done using M-PESA, which has over the years grown to become the most convenient way to transact,” said Ms. Mwangi.
There is such a huge growth opportunity for mobile payments with the convenience they possess, considering that there are 12.8 million M-pesa active monthly users and out of ten payments made in Kenya, nine are via cash. Safaricom already has 32,000 lipa na M-Pesa ready outlets in Kenya. The transport sector in Kenya was recently set out to a path of fully cashless payments and should this work well then the growth of cashless payments, of which Lipa Na M-pesa is one will see a huge growth in the country.
The third approach Safaricom is pushing growth in this front is by rewarding merchants who use Lipa Na Mpesa. They stand a chance to win a pick-up every two weeks with a total of Kshs 40 million to be won by merchants in the promotion period.
