M-Pesa, Kenya’s Safaricom’s mobile phone-based African money transfer service, and Visa have created a virtual payment card in an attempt to take a piece of the continent’s $40 billion-per-year subscription market.
Users will be able to safely pay 100 million global merchants like Amazon and Alibaba from their mobile phones using the M-Pesa Global Pay Visa Virtual card, which will eliminate the need for credit cards or PayPal accounts.
By April 2023, the virtual card will be available to more than 30 million M-Pesa users in Kenya, as well as Tanzania, where testing is underway, Mozambique, Congo, Lesotho, and Ghana, according to Lopokoiyit.
M-Pesa began as a simple money transfer service 15 years ago and has now grown to account for almost half of Safaricom’s revenue as customers use it for shopping, savings, borrowing, and insurance.
The virtual card’s transactions will be protected by a unique security code supplied to the user’s mobile phone and the user’s M-Pesa personal identification number.
According to M-Pesa Africa Managing Director Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, the virtual card is also aimed at Africa’s fast-growing subscription markets for services like Netflix (NFLX.O) and Spotify (SPOT.N).
“Many M-Pesa customers do not have bank accounts today… it (the virtual card) is a catalyst for e-commerce and digital payments,” said Visa representative Alex McCrea.
The M-Pesa platform’s transaction limitations in local Kenyan currency will be 150,000 shillings ($1,285) for a single transaction and a daily maximum of double that.
The virtual card will be usable for international travel.
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