Visa has announced that consumers of a Visa-led bank partnership in Kenya will be able to send money to each other domestically without paying transaction fees using mVisa.
The partnership offering free person-to-person (P2P) transactions currently includes nine Kenyan banks who have either enabled mVisa on their mobile banking applications and/or have acquired merchants to be able to accept mVisa.
These are;
- •Barclays Bank
- •Cooperative Bank
- •Ecobank
- •Family Bank
- •KCB Bank
- •National Bank of Kenya
- •NIC Bank
- •Prime Bank and
- •Standard Chartered Bank
“This is a significant move especially when you consider how much Kenyans spend on transaction fees for mobile money transfers every year. With 38.9 million active mobile phone subscriptions and Ksh. 515.9 billion in person-to-person money transfers within the last quarter of 2016, mobile money payments have become an integral part of Kenyans’ lives,” said Andrew Torre, Group Country Manager for Visa Sub-Saharan Africa.
Consumers can use mVisa to send money directly from their bank to a recipient’s bank account regardless of whether they use a smart phone or feature phone. Transactions are processed via Visa’s global network, VisaNet, applying the scale, security and reliability of Visa to mobile payments in emerging markets.
mVisa will now also be accepted at a number of merchant locations across the country through Direct Pay Online and Jambo Pay.
The mVisa implementation in Kenya benefited from the Visa Developer Platform, which allowed all partner banks the ability to integrate the mVisa APIs directly into their mobile banking apps.
mVisa is now live in Kenya, India, Rwanda and Egypt with plans to launch in Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Vietnam underway.