Shoppers paying with M-Pesa at some retail counters will no longer need to type a till number or amount. Safaricom and payments firm Pesapal have started rolling out QR codes and contactless taps that fill in those details automatically.
Under the arrangement announced on October 1, Pesapal’s point-of-sale terminals will display a Dynamic Scan-to-Pay code for each sale. When a customer scans it, the merchant’s details and the exact amount appear on the phone, leaving the customer only to confirm. Customers with NFC-enabled smartphones can instead tap the phone on the terminal.
Fewer wrong-till payments
For merchants the appeal is fewer mistakes. Manual entry of till numbers and amounts is a familiar source of disputes at the counter, from a digit typed wrongly to a payment sent to the wrong business. Pre-filled payments also speed up queues in supermarkets and fuel stations.
The standard Scan-to-Pay service, which links a printed QR code to a till, is already available at more than 60,000 merchant outlets. Safaricom says it wants to reach 500,000 within the next year.
AI Pay reads receipts
Safaricom is also adding a feature called AI Pay to My OneApp, which it says has more than seven million downloads. A customer photographs a printed or handwritten receipt, and where the information is available the app picks out the till or paybill number and the amount.
The launch fits a wider push by the operator to keep M-Pesa at the centre of in-store payments as card networks and banks promote contactless cards and as rival wallets court merchants. Tap-to-pay on phones puts M-Pesa on similar footing to contactless bank cards at the same terminal.
Pesapal brings an existing base of merchant terminals, which saves Safaricom from having to supply hardware to every shop. The companies did not disclose the commercial terms or how many Pesapal devices will carry the new features at launch.
Earlier this month Safaricom also began offering Jumbe, a second SMS receipt that lets customers show proof of payment without revealing their M-Pesa balance, on tills where the merchant has turned it on.
Photo: Raidarmax / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
