Building your own solution is best if you have the know how. I also built my own in-house payment system which works well. It is not directly pay-bill but it is M-pesa based. It is also prone to the down times that you mentioned e.g blackouts and net out. But those challenges encourage one to build fail safes and if possible manual control to minimize bad quality of service. This is the third year and the system is still going strong serving us well. You cannot wait for Safaricom or other Service providers to give you APIs if that is not their priority. Regards.
We have been waiting 3 years for Safaricom to give us an API for bulk payments and we continue to wait. In the meantime we developed our own solution that screen scrapes the M-Pesa B2C website. Plenty of others have done the same. The tricky part is making it robust enough to deal with the more and more frequent outages and severe slow downs that site experiences. Before developing our own solution we looked at a solutions for sale by couple of others but they all took a "fire and forget" approach where the system would attempt to upload the payment but would not track the payment through to completion on the site to make sure it actually completed. This didn't give us the level of reliability that we needed. That was a couple of years ago so these days there may be commercial systems out there that can do it. If you do try to develop your own solution make sure to ask Safaricom to give you access to the training site so you can test your system without actually sending money.
These days with the frequent outages of the B2C site we are seriously looking at alternative mobile money/banking systems, particularly for stuff like payroll that is time critical.
Josh
On 6/23/2012 10:40 PM, skunkworks-request@lists.my.co.ke wrote:
Message: 2 Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2012 21:41:00 +0300 From: joe mwirigi<joemwirigi@gmail.com> To:calvinebarongo@gmail.com, Skunkworks Mailing List <skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke> Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] [skunkworks]Pay bill Bulk payments Message-ID: <CA+S+JsY3vVACAZ_dzxfeqXN8x+krtm1+ixwjK4kZavMEKqXtTQ@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
@calvine, thanks
@kivuva:-)
We can always keep the faith.
rgds
*_______________________________________________________________ We must Keep on, *
_______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke ------------ List info, subscribe/unsubscribe http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------
Skunkworks Rules http://my.co.ke/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=94 ------------ Other services @ http://my.co.ke
Mungai S. Mbugua CTO Elimu Holdings Limited sospeter@elimu.co.ke