Airtel Money cash tills and paybills will be open for transactions by users on the rival M-Pesa platform from March, a top official said, closing a gap that has existed since 2022 when the former’s subscribers were allowed to pay to the corresponding Safaricom payment platforms.
Airtel Money Managing Director Anne Kinuthia-Otieno said plans are in top gear to implement the payments interoperability within the current quarter.
“Currently, our customers can pay into the competition Paybills or Tills and the reverse is now going to happen where any customer from the competition can also pay to any of the Airtel Money Paybills and Tills,” she said in an interview.
Interoperability allows participants in different systems to clear and settle payments or financial transactions across systems.
“By this quarter, we’ll now be able to have seamless interoperability on payments. We are getting a lot of support from our regulator as well as from our competition to be able to open this up,” Kinuthia-Otieno said.
Once implemented, the transition will remove a hurdle where M-Pesa subscribers, for example, cannot pay for goods and services through mobile payment platforms owned by Airtel Money.
This comes three years after Safaricom launched a similar system in April 2022, allowing M-Pesa to receive payments from rival platforms on its Lipa na M-Pesa channels.
The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) was at the time fronting a seamless transfer of cash across rival payment platforms to replicate the linkage of individual consumer transfers between Airtel Money and M-Pesa that was introduced in 2018.
Airtel’s version of merchant payment services is dubbed Lipa na Airtel Money but it is much less used compared to Safaricom’s market position, which is in line with its stake in the mobile money transfer service.
Once Airtel’s plan comes to life, it will mark the close of the second part of a three-phased CBK-led national payments blueprint touching on telco operators, which seeks to facilitate the smooth flow of funds across networks.
The CBK had earlier said that the increased use of mobile money by agents and merchants had been constrained by the lack of interconnection among the telecommunications operators.
The first phase of the apex bank’s strategy was the opening up of direct, person-to-person cash transfers to customer e-wallets run by rival platforms, which came after banks had successfully integrated their systems using PesaLink – an electronic platform that allows the transfer of funds across accounts in different banks.
The final stage will involve the interoperability of agent networks, which, Ms Kinuthia-Otieno says, will enable customers from whichever network to withdraw or deposit cash from any agent outlet.
“To ensure that interoperability fully works, we need now to move to agent interoperability where you don’t need as a customer to care about which firm owns a given agent shop. As a customer, you just need to go and withdraw or deposit money regardless of the outlet,” she says.
M-Pesa’s market share as of end of September 2024 was the lowest since the regulator started making the disclosures in September 2022 when the market leader enjoyed a 96.8 percent share against Airtel Money’s 3.1 percent.
Airtel Money’s growth in the quarter to September marked an extension of a trend observed during the 12-month period to June 2024 when the platform expanded its market share in the country from 2.8 percent to 6.6 percent, as M-Pesa’s shrunk from 97.1 percent to 93.4 percent.
