KDN sets up mobile and internet payments gateway with MobiPay.
Everyone it seems is trying to get in on the opportunity to become a major player in the fast growing mobile and internet payments space in the greater East African region. Over the better part of the last six months, a variety of different businesses spanning start-ups to a well established regional bank have announced their own unique offerings. In many of these cases, each offering is either based on more traditional payment channels like credit and debit cards or more market relevant mobile payment systems that work online. In the case of the latter, the big draw is that in Kenya alone there are over eight million M-Pesa customers moving millions of dollars in transactions every month. A small slice of this market alone would make big business sense.
In the course of this week, Kenya Data Networks (KDN) is the latest company that announced it was entering the mobile and internet payments business. Their offering to be known as “MobiPay” goes a step further by consolidating a variety of stakeholders and channels including internet, mobile, proximity, credit cards, banks, merchants and consumers. This basically means that MobiPay will act as an ecosystem that takes care of all the complex integrations and interfaces for mobile and internet based payments. KDN has also confirmed that MobiPay will work with both Safaricom’s M-Pesa and Zain’s Zap mobile money services from inception in around two months time. KDN’s ambition is that MobiPay will become the defacto internet and mobile payments gateway not only in Kenya or East Africa, but across Africa.
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All this bodes well with the development of ecommerce in the region but the biggest challenge will be upon the merchants to build a sense of trust to the customers for them to be able to send the money and wait for the goods to be deliverd. Kenyans are being conned left and right and tend to be quite a suspicious lot.
ecosystem? lol. still confused over the word in this context… but then again, it might just be due to the schools i attended 🙂
@athman you always manage to crack me up! 🙂 you do get the gist though. Blame on me for reading to many business and IT books over the years.
Great news for everyone trying to do business online. And all concerned parties need to work fast to make up for the time lost. However, my great concern is, someone (read the govt, read the policy makers) should also involve the authorities that will be involved when cases of fraud/con pop up. In my view, this has been the greatest impediment. As I write this, I know our police, interpol desk at CID offices, and NSIS have no clue on what to do about online fraud/theft cases. I am writing from experience.
@levis. true but progress is being made. Its usually the case that laws and regulations tend to follow innovation. Look at how M-Pesa was treated by the banks when it first launched. Now, all the banks are integrating with M-Pesa. Change is coming but the benefits outweigh the risks.
hi moses, is this mobipay operational at the moment ? ama iko jikoni?
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@njoro not yet. They roll out in a couple of months time
why announce a product that you intend to launch some months down the line…?? KDN should do better than that. Still, this will go a long way in deepening e-commerce in the region
I have been watching his development with keen interest and i want to point out why mobipay by kdn is doomed to fail in epic proportions.First of all,mpesa which is he biggest mobile money carrier in Kenya will not be very eager to share customer data to aid seamless integration with kdn side of things.What this means,should safaricom one day wake up and decide to allow mpesa users to access their cash both on the handset and on the internet,kdn will be relegated to the league of little known online credit card evangelists with flash weekly newsletters and nothing to show for it.
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@climateox its really hard to tell at this stage how things will pan out for KDN. Only time will tell.
There are all these guys: jambopay, ipal, pesapal, mobikash and ivera and e-pesa.
They all claim to do similar stuff.
How do they compare?
Ipay has Zap and Mpesa
JamboPay has Zap, Visa Credit card, Visa Debit card,
PesaPal has Mpesa
Iveri exists in South Africa
Mobikash is mobile based money transfer system across banks
epesa..I dont know
All the e-commerce modules are solutions we’ve been waiting for a while now. Pl do details their charges; I’m only familiar with Pesapal charges but esp blank with mobipay