KahawaTungu
Over 200,000 Businesses Now on Lipa na M-Pesa
by Francis MuliThe number of businesses on Lipa na M-Pesa platform has crossed the 200,000 mark, Safaricom has said.
This makes the platform, which was launched in 2012, arguably the most preferred alternative to cash especially during the Covid-19 pandemic period. The service caters for businesses by providing higher transaction and account limits, more secure payments and easy integration with business systems and other financial services.
“The mobile phone has today become the most preferred alternative to cash and its popularity only continues to grow. More than ever, an increasing number of businesses are discovering the numerous advantages of cashless payments resulting in high growth for Lipa Na M-Pesa,” said Peter Ndegwa, CEO, Safaricom.
The rush by businesses in taking up the service has also been able to meet growing uptake of Lipa Na M-Pesa amongst Kenyans, with customers using the service increasing by 1 million since January 2020 to more than 6 million today.
Read: Safaricom Unveils New No-Expiry PostPay Plans
The Retail sector leads in business usage of the service, followed by Hospitality (Hotels, Restaurants and Bars, and Catering), then General Trade, and Distributors.
Recently, Safaricom launched the Lipa Na M-Pesa Business App which provides businesses with detailed reporting tools and a dashboard to track their cash flow. The App has been downloaded by more than 90,000 businesses since its launch two months ago.
Safaricom also launched M-Pesa Daraja Application Programming Interface (APIs), which empowers any business or developer to build their applications on top of M-PESA.