Essar Kenya Welcomes Shared Mobile Money Transfer System

yuCash, the mobile money transfer service brand of Essar Telecom Kenya Limited,  says that it is ready to participate in the recent recommendation by a Government taskforce calling on mobile service providers to develop a common system for facilitating mobile money transfers across networks.

There was a task force set up by the Prime Minister’s office to look into the contentious issues in the telecommunications sector. One of its proposal was that that mobile firms should work towards creating a seamless mobile money transfer system regulated by Central Bank of Kenya as a way of increasing the usage of the service. This effectively means that subscribers of any network will be able to send and receive money via their mobile phones across any other network.

You would understand other mobile firms supporting this and its workability is in question. Also business should be about competing on innovation. I guess that if today you tell all other operators to dump their money transfer services and use M-Pesa, they will easily allow that. But tell them all to use yuCash, Orange MOney or Zap, they will just be so reluctant because none of them latter have been even as closely successful as Safaricom’s M-Pesa.

Commenting on the proposal, yuMobile Country Manager, Madhur Taneja said: “It is our desire to give our subscribers the very best in services and one way of doing that is to ensure that we eliminate any blockages that hinder consumers from making choices that suit their needs. Customers should be able to transfer money across networks just like they are able to make calls and send text messages, and with yuCash, they will enjoy affordable rates and unique features such as being able to transact online when they don’t have their mobile handset at hand.”

Madhur added: “We hope that the CCK and Central Bank Kenya will back the implementation of this useful platform that is long overdue.”

I think shared mobile money transfer system is such a great idea but that should not kill competition on innovation. It is one area which should welcome more players instead of limiting it to a one horse race.