In April, Safaricom brought the servers that support its groundbreaking innovation (the mobile money transfer services M-PESA) to Kenya, an undertaking in which it partnered with Huawei. Today, the telecom made another important announcement that has long been waited for by both the local and international developers. Available
Safaricom announced that it is unveiling the M-PESA API to both local and international developers. In the hope that the developers will come up with better next-gen apps that will work on East Africa’s most popular mobile money transfer services.
Betty Mwangi, the Director of Financial Services as Safaricom was quoted saying, “One of the advantages of the new M-PESA platform is the fact that it is easier to integrate with other financial platforms to offer more or improved services to our customers.”
The move to relocate the M-PESA servers from Germany to Kenya solved some of the shortcomings the mobile money previously was facing. It addressed the slow and bureaucratic process of approving operations both locally in Kenya and by the team manning the servers in Germany.
By unveiling the M-PESA API to developers, Safaricom hopes that they will come up with better solutions for the Consumer to Business, Business to Business and Business to Consumers channels for the mobile money platform.
Mwangi further said, “As we have always said, innovation is at the heart of everything we do. We do however accept that innovation cannot come from us alone – it takes partnerships to come up with some of the best possible solutions that will help Transform Lives.”
The telecom enjoys the bragging rights in Kenya with the most subscribers, 23 million subscribers to be precise. Out of these numbers, more than 19 million customers use M-PESA services on a regular basis. Thus, the opening up of the M-PESA API could see users of the services enjoy a richer set of features on the mobile money platform.
