Tag Archive for 'transfers'

Zain Kenya launches Zap International Mobile Money Transfers.

Published on September 23, 2009 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I am following a couple of threads on some Kenyan mailing lists and apparently Zain Kenya may just have upped the ante with regards to International mobile money transfers on its Zap service. The news I’m picking up is that Zap users in Kenya can now receive International money transfers directly on their mobile phones. The interesting bit is that the sender of the funds does this directly from their bank account to the Zap user who is subscribed to the service. This new Zap offering from Zain Kenya is bound to shake up the multi-billion shilling International remittances business which has been largely dominated by Western Union for the better part of a decade. However, Safaricom, the market leader for mobile money transfers in Kenya through its M-PESA offering will probably respond aggressively to this initiative, using its sheer brawn of 14+ million mobile subscribers.

In other interesting news over the last week or so, both NIC Bank and KCB have launched their own mobile banking services. This is in no way massively innovative since  Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, and many other Banks have also launched mobile banking offerings in past 6 months or so. However, one of the unique features that both KCB’s KCB Connect and NIC Bank’s Mobile Banking services have is the ability to draw funds from your account and deposit them into your Safaricom M-Pesa account. This will undoubtedly create an interesting customer value proposition that realizes convenience, efficiency and effectiveness for them. It also means that rather than seeing M-Pesa as threat, KCB and NIC Bank are using it as a way of generating additional transactions with their customers, leading to more billings.

Safaricom’s M-Pesa outage and Zain’s Zap game changer?

Published on August 12, 2009 in random. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Over the last week or so, many of Safaricom’s M-Pesa subscribers we’re affected by service failures that meant that they could nether send or receive payments. For many M-Pesa users, its not just a money transfer service, its a lifeline that they need just to function financially. Many un-banked M-Pesa users use the service as a form of a bank account and any failure in its reliability seriously compromises them. So, the jury is out as to whether M-Pesa has finally reached a breaking point after its exponential growth over the last few years.

Another interesting development on the mobile money transfer market in Kenya that recently came to my attention is that Zain’s Zap users can send money to other mobile networks. Now, at first, I thought that this surely can’t be possible. But, basically, a Zain Zap user can send you money on your Non-Zain mobile number and then you present the details of the transfer to a Zain Zap Agent. Its as simple as that! Could Zap be a game changer in Kenya’s mobile money transfers business? This remains to be seen!