NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, July 21, 2017

A global payments firm Visa has taken the competition for mobile money service a notch higher with the launch of mVisa that enables Kenyans use mobile phones to transact cash and make payments. The rollout of the service will enable Kenyans make free domestic mobile money transfers using mVisa.

The daily limit for person to person transfers will be Sh250,000 with the per transaction limit being Sh100,000. This is in comparison with mobile money services whose daily transaction limit is Sh140,000 while per transaction limit is Sh70,000.

Visa has not placed a limit on personal transfer to a merchant but the transactions might be subject to limits imposed by the different banks on the platform. The firm is coming to terms that not all Kenyans swipe cards as a payment method. This is despite the infrastructure including the availability of thousands of merchants with point of sale devices and the millions spent per year in marketing card payments in Kenya. The company has instead taken up the mobile cash transactions which it hopes to ‘cash in’ on mobile penetration in its latest onslaught in the market to gain acceptance.