Safaricom, the largest telecom company in Kenya, is piloting a social messaging app that will link to M-Pesa in a strategy to get into the application business, the company said on Tuesday.
The app is dubbed Bonga, a colloquial Kiswahili word for ‘to chat.’ The app will be integrated with Safaricom’s mobile money platform to enable the almost 28 million users to chat before sending money to each other.
“It’s one thing to share information with somebody it’s another thing to make a payment, to send money to somebody,” Kamal Bhattacharya, chief innovation officer at Safaricom, stated in a telephone interview. “We want to use this platform to make it much easier […] for people to engage.”
Bhattacharya said M-Pesa users will get three chat options: user-to-user, user-to-business, and social groups.
Bonga is the first product introduced by Safaricom’s innovation incubator Alpha. The company will pilot the app with its staff before it is released later this year.
Bhattacharya said the platform will be end-to-end encrypted. “We cannot read the messages, we cannot keep the messages,” he said.
Safaricom, which is owned by Vodacom, the Treasury, Vodafone, and retail investors, has about 30 million users (69 percent of Kenyan mobile subscribers.)
The company has introduced Bonga with the aim of increasing revenue and value to its customers beyond offering voice calls, mobile money, and text message services. In 2017, Safaricom introduced Masoko, an e-commerce platform.
“Our future is to become a platform that enables business in Kenya as well as our consumers to do their work in a different way,” Bhattacharya asserted. “Messenger platforms are the most popular apps, the most popular approach on the internet today to bring people together.”
