Safaricom is a market leader in mobile money, both locally and globally. The company is doing well by any means. But there are some limitations that are presented by Mpesa being hosted in Rackspace servers in Germany. These include developing on top of Mpesa, and other maneuverability of the service to deliver services better. Safaricom made the announcement sometime last year that they were going to bring Mpesa to be hosted within Kenya.
Today the company announces that Mpesa is now home. The process which is in it’s final testing stages to go live in Kenya and this will impact on speeds of service and efficiency while it will be fully running from Kenya.
Safaricom has 19 million customers on Mpesa and 81,000 Mpesa agents and the service forms majority of the money transfer done within the country. Safaricom realizes that there are still strides to be done in financial inclusion, and as CEO Bob Collymore says, 9 out of 10 money transactions are in cash. This presents a huge opportunity for growth. There has been a move by Safaricom previously to get government services to run via Mpesa and more needs to be done.
Thus this move to host Mpesa services in Kenya add benefits like enhanced system availability by reduction in points of failure, access of Mpesa integration by third parties to enhance integration to more services and even open up more opportunity to many on what Mpesa can do.
Developing…….
