Safaricom is conducting major upgrades on the M-Pesa App, that will allow businesses to advertise themselves on the platform.
The service could come in handy for the telco as a new stream of revenue, further stamping its authority in the market as one of the leading companies in the region in terms of profit generation.
This comes days after Vodacom Group, Safaricom’s parent company, signed an agreement with China’s Ant Group to operationalise Alipay in South Africa. Alipay is a popular mobile and online payment platform with over one billion users.
Read: Safaricom Launches Promotions to Reward Business Owners Using Lipa na M-Pesa, Pochi la Biashara
Some of the Alipay features such as advertising will be built into the M-Pesa platform for rollout in Kenya and Tanzania.
“In the case of Kenya and Tanzania in time we will start to get merchants to expose their products into the M-Pesa app through the mini-app capability. The concept is that of course the more learnings and the more stuff we can develop in South Africa we will then look to agree with Alipay to expand some of those services into the international markets on a case-by-case basis,” Vodacom’s chief executive Shameel Joosub said.
Alipay prides itself of services such as financial services, entertainment, shopping, merchant services and direct marketing.
Vodacom banks on the experience gained from the South African market to launch in other markets such as Kenya and Tanzania, with the major target being the high end users.
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