Mobile money payments have risen as merchants and consumers try and avoid handling physical money. Micro, small and medium enterprises(MSMEs) have a lot to gain using mobile money.
There’s now a huge demand for merchants to offer contactless payment solutions which has given MPESA payments a fresh boost. Safaricom made it easier to use and process Lipa na Mpesa payments with a dedicated app called MPESA for Business.
MPESA for business entails Till and Paybill numbers. Safaricom has made the process easy as it is now an online affair.
The M-PESA for business app has been purposely aimed to augment the offerings of the USSD code with more useful features which are welcome to business owners making the entire experience seamless and easy to use. Features the app has include the ability to track your business’s money-in and money-out patterns to get the most out of your working capital. The tracking is visualized using a graph and they can be expanded for further insights such as accumulated values in a given day.
Merchants can also see all transactions that are made or received in their accounts. Owners can further use the money-in and money-out filter to filter between credit and debit.
The Pay Customer feature in the app allows merchants to pay their suppliers, perform refunds or salaries directly to their M-PESA wallets.
With the app, merchants now have the ability to receive payments from clients more quickly. This lets them arrange delivery and pay over the phone which increases efficiency for the enterprise.
The M-PESA for Business app is further equipped with the Withdraw Money option in the app that allows business owners to move money collected on their tills to their own M-PESA wallets, M-PESA agents or bank accounts.
Paybill and Buy Goods merchants can pay their suppliers directly from their till.
Merchants with multiple tills or Paybill accounts can access them at the same time using the M-PESA for Business app. You can manage and transact across them, but they have to nominate a single number to access the tills.
Micro, small, and medium enterprises(MSMEs) need to frequently pay and be paid which could sometimes be in (relatively) large amounts over long distances. This is a convenience feature that lowers their costs and they get to save time.
Safaricom is now reporting that the M-PESA for Business app has been downloaded over 50,000 times.
The telco is also reporting that Lipa Na Mpesa now has 186,000 users.
Mobile spending is popular in Kenya and comprises of over 80% of transactions according to the Central Bank of Kenya. Kenya’s leading telco has close to 24 million MPESA users who transact a lot of money daily and use the Lipa na MPESA option to pay for random goods and services offered by merchants countrywide.
Good but many functions are not working including the simplest and the most desired function, that is, daily transactions list, filtering transactions over a given period. The graph has been given prominence but it is not that important. Of importance is transaction visibility, ability to reverse transactions, daily reconciliation etc