I think the only reason we are sitting around waiting to see Safaricom's moves in the tech sector and declare another kenyan first is lack of imagination and lethargy on the competitors part. Yu,Orange,Airtel are all fighting and failing badly at hyping their individual mobile money offerings. They do not have the extensive agent network, marketing strength or international coverage and reputation to be taken seriously. M-Pesa has all this. The ecommerce space is largely ignored save for the efforts of the likes of Agosta Liko with his pesapal outfit. The 3 underdogs could team up and run a singe platform and consolidate their no.s. Get the online ecommerce community in the box and the likes of the google play store and related stores to accept payment directly from the platform. Talk nicely to Mastercard/visa maybe to associate mobile phone no.s with a credit/debit card no to ease mobile payments. Or attempt to build an African centric system. Otherwise will have to wait for Safaricom to include online integration forever. The technology is available. What is lacking is political/bureacratic/financial will. I am a Safaricom shareholder and would increase my holding if I could seeing as they are the only ones who seem to know what they are doing. The lack of meaningful progress that we have is purely due to the monopoly that Safaricom was allowed to have by fumbling competitors. On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Kivuva <Kivuva@transworldafrica.com> wrote:
On 13 February 2013 16:58, Philip Musyoki <pmusyoki@gmail.com> wrote:
I also think as Kenyans we are to blame. We for far too long stuck to celebrating how huge MPESA was without challenging Safaricom to do more. I guess the success of one project more got on to their head more and they didn't feel the need to make it better.
<snip> You cannot push a private company to do more unless you are a shareholder. Strategy for the company is set by shareholders, not spectators. And since the platform in Germany is owned by Vodafone, Safaricom has to beg them to bring the service back home. That is positive effort. </snip>
What is worse is instead of getting better, the product actually deteriorated, with major outages and just became unpleasant to use. In the end, people kept on using MPESA because they were 'trapped' and not because was easy or good to use.
It is rather irritating when people keep on referring to the success story of MPESA. Move on. That was 7 years ago.
<snip> As successful as MPESA is, Since MPESA is owned by Vodafone, we have very little to brag about it. We were just used a guinea pigs to test the platform. And boy was it successful. </snip?
Good didn't sit down and celebrate search for decades. Apple didn't marvel at the iPhone in 2007 and stopped innovating. IBM created Watson for the Jeopardy challenge and eventually use the supercomputer to solve complex health problem.
Safaricom seems interested in the fees they now make from MPESA which they keep on hiking. If anything, with economies of scale, we expect to see lower prices.
<snip> Since Safaricom does not own the license for M-PESA (Vodafone does), they do not get as much revenue as the media makes us think. Vodafone has been earning royalties of between 10 per cent and 25 per cent of M-Pesa’s annual earnings since February 23, 2007. Royalties for owning MPESA platform, not because they are Safaricom shareholders.
http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Corporate-News/Vodafone-set-to-lower-MPes...
http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Corporate+News/Vodafone+takes+home+Sh1bn+... </snip>
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-- ______________________ Mwendwa Kivuva For Business Development Transworld Computer Channels Cel: 0722402248 twitter.com/lordmwesh www.transworldAfrica.com | Fluent in computing kenya.or.ke | The Kenya we know
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