Some good and bad news in the Mobile Money transfer scene from one of Kenya’s largest telecommunications company as of Thursday 21st August 2014
Safaricom Limited has today announced an adjustment in all MPESA Transaction fees as follows:
- Transfer fee for an amount between 501- 2500 KES has been reduced from 33 KES to 15 KES; a 54.5% reduction
- Transfer fee for an amount between 10 – 49 KES has been reduced from 3 KES to 1 KES; a 67% reduction
- Transfer fee for any amount between 2500 & 45,000 will go up by an unknown percentage (for now).
These new charges have been set to continue giving an option to the majority of Kenya’s un-banked population and the difference in revision direction comes from a recent research that suggest that majority of MPESA users transact between 1-2500 KES more frequently than other amount ‘bands’.
This has been seen as a strategic move to counter Equity Bank’s entry into the mobile operator business with the announcement that they would be running an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) as their next big thing under Equity 3.0.
According to their roll-out and strategy plan, the Equity MVNO accords Equity Bank the opportunity to continue its mission of furthering financial inclusion and innovative service offerings for all Kenyans by presenting their financial services offering on to a single platform which will make banking services more accessible, flexible convenient and more affordable.
Since the launch of M-PESA’s 7 years in 2007, its customer base has grown to 23% of the Kenyan population and the transactions on the Safaricom network are said to amount to 11% of Kenya’s GDP according to a 2010 article in The Economist magazine.
