Safaricom has launched a new service dubbed the M-pesa Surepay targeted at corporates and Public Benefit Organisations (PBO’s) who disburse funds directly to beneficiaries. The service offers the funding organization to place restriction on where the money is spent once its sent through their mobile money service M-pesa.
Safaricom’s Financial Services General Manager Betty Mwangi said the service will seal loopholes within the entire value chain right from disbusement to expenditure. “M-PESA SurePay allows fund managers to address challenges such as mismanagement and misappropriation of funds which are intended for particular causes,” said Mwangi.
Several Public Benefit Organizations have embraced M-pesa SurePay in their quest to deliver various services to the General Public. The World Food Programme has signed to the program and using it to send food vouchers to beneficiaries in counties facing starvation. The WFP is able to ensure the cash sent tot the beneficiaries is only used to pay for food and monitors the balance left as the service works with designated stores.
The service also targets organizations that need to pay salaries to their staff who live in areas not covered by financial institutions. The service will later be rolled out to farmers who will receive loan disbursement to buy farm inputs. The service’s major selling point is the large number of M-PESA Users currently at 21 million subscribers and leverages on the emergence of M-PESA as a preferred method for non-cash payments.
The introduction of the M-PESA SurePay comes as Safaricom’s drive towards a CashLite economy picks up pace with the planned deployment of a new M-PESA platform that will support up to 600 transactions per second, and pave way for deeper integration with other Financial Service systems.
This moves comes at the backdrop of the launch of the M-pesa Payment cards for settling government services and taxes. The M-Pesa debit cards and point of sale (POS) terminals will enable customers to pay for government services, which the state aims to shift online in a bid to curb corruption and to ease transactions at public offices.
