With revamped T-kash, Telkom Kenya aims to challenge Safaricom’s dominance

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

By Reuters Staff

Telkom Kenya relaunched a mobile financial services platform on Monday that it hopes can challenge Safaricom’s dominance of Kenya’s lucrative mobile money market.

It said it has spent 1 billion Kenyan shillings ($9.9 million) redesigning and rebranding the platform, T-kash, which enables customers to transfer money and pay bills via mobile phone. The company shut down its original mobile money platform, which drew a limited number of subscribers, last June.

It has now signed up 20,000 new mobile money agents to provide the service, which it hopes will help accelerate its subscriber growth, Telkom Chief Executive Officer Aldo Mareuse told reporters in Nairobi.

Telkom, which is 60 percent-owned by London-based Helios Investment Partners, is Kenya’s third biggest telecommunications company by users.

However, it faces an uphill battle in competing for subscribers with Safaricom’s pioneering mobile money platform M-Pesa, which is offered by 148,000 agents in Kenya, according to the country’s Communications Authority.

Photo courtesy of Simon Berry.

Source: Reuters (link opens in a new window)

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Finance
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digital payments, fintech, telecommunications