Telkom Kenya rebranded from Orange Kenya after a series of activities involving its management, which include it being acquired by a private equity firm, Helios. The rebrand promised to bring a lot of services to the table. Some of those promises have since been implemented, such as the goal to appeal to Kenya’s younger population with affordable data plans.
A few weeks after the transition from Orange, Telkom dropped its mobile money platform, Orange Money. At first, our guess was tha the solution was merely switching names, but that would not be the case. As any person could deduce from the carrier’s excellent promotional video, its version of a mobile money platform was more than what Orange Money could deliver, thus, the axe.
It appears that Telkom has completed testing the replacement, which we know will bring a number of additional services to rival Kenya’s SI unit for mobile money, M-PESA. While no one knows what the final product would include in its offerings, we would guess that robust mobile payments (that seem to leverage POS terminals) will be in tow, as well as normal transactions like sending and receiving cash, to mention a few.
According to Business Daily, Telkom Kenya is waiting for the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to approve the platform, a process that is consuming more time than we anticipated as estimates settled on a December 2017 launch. This could be attributed to CBK’s look into the platform’s sophistication that leverages customer-friendly technology.
Telkom’s CEO Aldo Mareuse says that the product is in its final stages to acquiring an operating license for an imminent launch.
Having gained more than 600,000 new customers in the first quarter of the 2017/2018 financial year, Kenya’s third mobile operator would want to serve its customers better with extras as promised during the rebrand. We will update you of this journey as often as possible, so stay tuned.
