Connecting the Safaricom Dots

Sometime This year Mpesa turned 10 at this age the Safaricom’s major baby had already made big moves, major bag alerts and hit the news waves. For those who have no idea who Safaricom is : Safaricom is a mobile network operator that offers internet connectivity, information management, voice, and communication solutions.  

Let us backtrack to 2016, when you have a high profile visitor at the door always know what they were interested in, study them, and Safaricom had a visitor ( rumor had it that Facebook wanted to buy Mpesa but later the claims were dismissed ) last year if ya’ll remember very well.  Zukerberg toured Africa, Nigeria and Kenya to be specific. Behind every rumor there is some element of truth,  We later came to learn that Facebook is testing Payments in Facebook Messenger then boom It came! practically let us say they cloned some element of Safaricom’s payment system: and , let us be somehow glad Safaricom decided not to sell.

Then, some time later in the year Uber, one of the greatest and largest taxi hailing companies around the globe had its moments in Africa,  and not to criticize as most of our developers are its time to clone: very many taxi hailing startups came to the rise only to die, and among the clones we had Little , Safaricoms taxi hailing company which launched in kenya then expanded to Nigeria.  Safaricom’s game is slow to the rise but sure its steady and some time when Uber had it unfair in Kenya the drivers started to shift to Little, Don’t give the visitors comfort in your Area, yes they have blessings but it’s invested elsewhere. 

Safaricom realized this visitors don’t actually come without a reason, Indeed Africa is a hot bed of Resources and brains. We are the next Revolution of the Technology regime if we remain on the right track.  Since then we knew Safaricom had something in mind  for us, we kept the thoughts then came 2017: in March, Safaricom and Msurvey launch Consumer Wallet to map Africa’s cash economy , yes I guess this is  where the card play shifted for Safaricom, you get to map, study and understand, find the vulnerabilities in the market the provide a solution to the problem faced. Well engineered thoughts.

Quoting TC : “In addition to its M-Pesa mobile money product ― used by 16.6 million Kenyans through a 100,744-agent network ― the company has been adding consumer and small business-based products to its mobile network. These include digital TV, the M-Kopa solar-powered lighting kit, Lipa-Na bill pay service and Little ride-hail app, which is now going head to head with Uber.”

M-pesa being the major product selling out Safaricom, has been integrated into alot of solutions out here in the ecosystem,  Recently as safaricom rebranded their Logo it had one of its products leak out, a product that will cause chills on the e-commerce bigwigs in Kenya to start with.  Safaricom is set to launch an ecommerce plartform : Masoko (as the name suggests ‘Markets’ this is not only tackling one market but lots let’s wits and see) .  With the recent fall of Jumia Market formerly Kaymu will see Safaricom set the house in order better too for the product yet to come.  Masoko’s main aim to boost Mpesa payment plartform.

Quoting Bloomberg : “Safaricom is looking for ways to build on the success of M-Pesa, its mobile-phone money transfer service that dominates the Kenyan economy and is used by subscribers to pay for everything from utility bills to groceries and gasoline. The company accounts for 75 percent of the country’s 40.6 million Internet users, while M-Pesa handled 432.5 billion shillings ($4.2 billion) of mobile commerce transactions in the first quarter, more than half the total 627.5 billion shillings ($6.04 billion), according to data published by the industry regulator.”

In 2017, Safaricom hasn’t stopped making it better for the Ecosystem,  On August 1st Safaricom announced the release of Its M-Pesa Api.

“M-PESA provides a unique platform that enables thousands of businesses to leverage its capabilities to drive their growth. The simplified onboarding process will enable both small and large businesses to integrate to M-PESA as a payment platform for their businesses with ease,” said Bob Collymore, CEO Safaricom

We've simplified M-PESA Integration to provide growth opportunities for businesses. Click here to read more https://t.co/Y160VKgZmR #Daraja pic.twitter.com/vRo6uarSc7

— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) August 1, 2017

This is not only a big news to the ecosystem developers but also to the business Industry all over the country, This is another dependency journey on Safaricom services, With the launch of M-pesa 1 Tap back in may, Safaricom is all about money now and making it better and faster, slowly going from subscription services into a Fintech. Clearly Safaricom is maximizing on every subscriber details at the moment and anytime to come, convertion from Mobile subscribers to M-pesa users then to customers on their plartform then to business people whose transactions and records depend on the API.

Quoting Techweez :”For this reason, developers and businesses must take note of mobile capabilities that cover the customer lifecycle – including searching for a given product, combing the internet for additional information and deciding if a product is worth purchasing.”

Safaricom is a mentor to those who have eyes, they have created one plartform then everything elese is dependent on that even your life lol!  we should all learn to do business the right way maybe the Safaricom Way, the Flutterwave way.