Safaricom to add another feature on M-Pesa
If the feature is activated, all M-Pesa users will be affected.
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The service dubbed Bonga (Swahili word for Chat) will be integrated with M-Pesa to allow the subscribers to communicate beyond sending money to one another, transforming the platform into a type of social network.
“It’s one thing to share information with somebody it’s another thing to make a payment, to send money to somebody,” Kamal Bhattacharya, chief innovation officer at Safaricom, said in a telephone interview.
“We want to use this platform to make it much easier ... for people to engage.”
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The company has said it is piloting Bonga with its staff before planning to launch later this year.
Bhattacharya said the platform will be end-to-end encrypted. “We cannot read the messages, we cannot keep the messages,” he said.
Safaricom is 35 per cent owned by South African group Vodacom and 5 per cent by Vodacom’s major shareholder Vodafone.
With nearly 30 million users, the company has 69 per cent of Kenya’s total mobile phone subscribers.
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Three new features
This means, Mr Bhattacharya explained that M-Pesa users will be able to message each other on Bonga in three ways: user-to-user, user-to-business and fundraising through “social groups” much like the group function on WhatsApp.
Bonga is the first product launched by the company’s innovation incubator Alpha.
Last year it launched , an e-commerce platform.
It’s first-half revenue announced in November showed that revenue from M-Pesa rose 16 per cent, while revenue from phone calls rose by far less - only 4 per cent. Mobile internet service revenue rose by nearly a third.
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“Our future is to become a platform that enables business in Kenya as well as our consumers to do their work in a different way,” Bhattacharya said.
“Messenger platforms are the most popular apps, the most popular approach on the internet today to bring people together.”
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