Hakikisha: Safaricom boosts M-Pesa accuracy

Communications service provider Safaricom has introduced a number verification feature for its mobile money transfer platform to minimise cases of users sending money to unintended recipients.

The new feature, dubbed Hakikisha, has been piloted for one month and will now be rolled out in phases to reach all 21.7 million users of M-Pesa by the end of this month.

“On any given day, we receive an average of 12,000 calls from our M-Pesa customers seeking to have reversals done for transactions made to the wrong recipients,” said Safaricom’s Director of Financial Services, Betty Mwangi.

Ms Mwangi added that although a majority of these cases are resolved successfully, the practice remains a major inconvenience for users, necessitating the new function.

Official records

The intended recipients’ names will be queried against official records registered by customers and Pay Bill partners, and then flashed on the screen. A user will be prompted to type 1 if the name is wrong. This, however, must be done within 15 seconds.

The pop-up feature will also apply to other M-Pesa transactions, including payments on Lipa Na M-Pesa and agent withdrawals.

The new feature is part of the upgrades Safaricom has been able to make on its money transfer platform after the telco relocated its servers from Germany, where they have been hosted since 2008, to Kenya five months ago.

Among other advantages, the new system has doubled transaction speeds from 450 transactions per second to 900 transactions per second, bolstering Safaricom’s muscle in the lucrative and increasingly competitive mobile money market.

Safaricom has further opened up M-Pesa’s application programming interface (API) to local developers in a bid to allow for the development of third-party applications.