Mobile phone-based payments and money transfer service M-PESA, has partnered with payments processing giant Visa, to issue physical debit cards to its millions of customers.
The physical cards will be operational across the eight countries where M-PESA is available, enhancing the convenience for customers who require reliable payment methods for various subscription services. According to M-PESA, the debit card will be a tap-to-go solution for customers that will also enable merchants to receive payments seamlessly.
Also, the company announced that it will provide tourists with a solution that will enable any visitor to the eight M-PESA markets to pair their Visa card with M-PESA for seamless payments across almost 1 million businesses on the service.
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Announcing this recent development, M-PESA wrote on X,
“In line with our purpose of transforming lives, we are innovating our payment solutions to provide customers and businesses with more options and additional convenience. As part of this strategy, Safaricom has achieved PCI DSS compliance, which builds on our strategic partnership with Visa, expanding M-PESA’s payment capabilities to include card issuing and acquisition.
“PCI DSS compliance enables M-PESA to begin offering tap-to-pay card payments for the more than 60 million customers, 5 million businesses and 100,000 developers across our entire ecosystem. This will empower them to receive mobile payments, online and in-person card payments from any customer across the world. M-PESA will also provide tourists with a solution that will enable any visitor to the eight M-PESA markets to pair their Visa card with M-PESA for seamless payments across almost 1 million businesses on the service.
“FinTechs and financial institutions are equally set to leverage our card processing capabilities empowering them to provide end-to-end mobile and card payment solutions. Together with Visa, M-PESA currently offers virtual payment cards to our more than 60 million customers and 925,000 merchants across our markets”.
Until now, M-PESA only provided its customers with a virtual card called GlobalPay, powered by Visa. The virtual card is linked to M-PESA users wallet and enables them to make payments to international online merchants for goods and services using their card details.
Those virtual cards were however limited to only online purchases and could not be used at Kenya’s cash-first retail stores.
With the roll-out of physical debit cards, M-PESA, which serves over 51 million Kenyans, is set to transform the payment habits in the country where it operates, making it a major player in the global digital payments arena.
This remarkable step is designed to build on the success of M-PESA’s mobile money services and extends its functionality beyond the existing virtual GlobalPay card to include physical retail transactions.
Established on the 6th of March 2007 by Vodafone’s Kenyan associate, Safaricom, M-PESA is Africa’s leading mobile money service with more than 604,000 active agents operating across the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique and Tanzania.
The Fintech company has been lauded by many, for giving millions of people access to the formal financial system, and for its pivotal role in reducing crime in otherwise largely cash-based societies.