Comments on: What you don’t know about M-PESA

By: maze

maze — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:05:49 +0000

Olga, The success of M-PESA was not hinged on the development of the code and “business processes”. Some of us had already developed software that could do exactly what M-PESA does before it was launched while still in University. The success of the product arose from the distribution channels built by the Commercial department in Safaricom. The agencies and business partners were the key. For your information, one of Safaricom’s rivals in Kenya launched a money transfer service BEFORE M-PESA was launched, yet it floundered due to the lack of a distribution network.

By: Bern

Bern — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 07:58:50 +0000

@ Rural freak, If illetracy is a barrier it is very minimal. M-pesa agents are business people who register with Safaricom to offer the services of M-pesa. That explains that they will only operate in places they profitably serve. Thats why some banks have partnered with it to offers cash any time.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:09:56 +0000

From a Business information Systems POV Olga has done a great job.She has expounded on the infamous SDLC which any system undergoes,some see it only from a Maintenance point of view, which should be the view of the normal M-pesa user,anyone in the academic world knows how much the word :source: means to a concept.I for one didnt know about Sagentia

By: George Kinyanjui

George Kinyanjui — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:44:20 +0000

Hi Olga and Ignacio,
I am also a doctoral candidate. I would like to share the MFI loan repayment side of Mpesa which as you correctly put was the original idea. I have for the last two and a half years undertaken a pilot and consequently rolled out for a micro finance institution in Kenya. It has been a healthy learning experience.

By: Michael Uiari

Michael Uiari — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:21:13 +0000

“Many also questioned whether M-PESA could beat out a form of value transfer that was already in place—airtime.”

I would like to explore this issue and would be grateful for you all to provide your insights and suggestions and for the author to share her insight on this issue.

If the transfer of value is already posssible through P2P airtime transfers, which could lead to an informal network that operates similarly to a m money service, how does a m money service displace a pre-existing informal method of transferring value to be utilised in the same way – to withdraw cash, buy goods and pay for services using airtime.

By: gmeltdown

gmeltdown — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:26:27 +0000

You cannot divorce the M-PESA story from the patriotic emotion of Kenyans

By: Sulah Ndaula

Sulah Ndaula — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:57:59 +0000

Everything said, Olga did her piece in enhancing the M-Money practice and body of knowledge. What I see many of us say, is that Olga must have covered everything and that she must have worn all the lenses of seeing things – that never happens in life, she had to have an angle, ours shld only be suggestions for further studies.

By: M-PESA Fan

M-PESA Fan — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:02:59 +0000

P2P Money transfer was a facility available to customer on Day 1 of the M-PESA pilot – so the pilot was most certainly not a flop! It was not re-engineered technically as a result of the trial; rather the marketing campaign at launch used the learnings to make P2P transfer the fore-runner, and to downgrade the MFI emphasis. These days you can see Pay Bill on the phone just as prominently as Pay MFI was in the pilot days. The simplification for launch was about streamlining the customer message more than anything else.

By: Peter Wanyonyi

Peter Wanyonyi — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:42:09 +0000

@Mukata: Susie’s model was not “a flop” – it provided the infrastructure, the backbone, the basis for the eventual take-off of M-PESA in its current form. Recall that, prior to Susie, this application of mobile money had simply not been implemented – even thought of – elsewhere, nor by anyone else as far as one can tell. As is noted, the very same model currently wildly successful in Kenya is yet to catch on in Tanzania – perhaps a result of the slight differences in implementation, or the prevailing economic environment there, or whatever. It is noteworthy that, from her research, Susie thought M-PESA would work in Kenya. Without this initial spur, the service would probably not exist as we know it. Technologies are sometimes applied to uses not initially intended for them: this is the basis of progress, innovation and adaptation that allows societies to move forward.

By: Tim Mukata

Tim Mukata — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:38:16 +0000

That small team of Finance, Customer Care, Integrators etc guided Susie Lonie to actually get it right…long before launch. Take note that the first business model the Susie brought – the MFI model, actually flopped when put to real test on the ground.

Those mentioned re-engineerings, resulting in the launch as a P2P service was a design bred out of the local professional input, and the local market.

And these guys also spent 24×7 hours, not only the Sagentia guys. And they brought in design ideas on the hows and the whys. And they designed the business processes which Sagentia mirrored in the form of system processes.

Put another way, were it not for these specific inputs, the MPESA model courtesy of Susie and Sagentia was a cropper. Plain and simple.