Safaricom has partnered with eight more financial institutions to enable businesses which use Lipa Na M-PESA to transfer funds from their Lipa Na M-PESA tills to their bank accounts real time. The new partnerships include KCB, Equity bank, Jamii Bora, Chase Bank, Cooperative Bank, Diamond Trust Bank, UBA and Consolidated Bank in addition to Standard Chartered and NIC Banks.
The real time settlement service follows the integration of Safaricom’s M-Pesa platfrom with payment systems of these banks. The integration reduces the time taken by M-Pesa merchants to convert their available float into cash, where previously bank clients used the manual RGTS system, which took a minimum of six hours for the conversion.
Lipa Na M-PESA Merchants can move between Kshs. 50 and Kshs. 50 million from their Lipa Na M-PESA tills to their banks, with no limitation on the number of transactions that they can make within a day. The service also allows the banks’ customers and M-Pesa agents to among other things deposit and access float in real time.
A similar proposition between Safaricom and Standard Chartered targets businesses, commercial and corporate, where merchants will be able to transfer as little as as Kshs. 10, with businesses being able to transfer from a merchant’s headquarters or through a paybill to paybill number that belongs to their banks. The Chase Bank proposition offers a holistic solution called Mobile2Bank targeting businesses.
