The app’s roll out begins with four African banks and mVisa will enable transactions for people with accounts at KCB Group and Co-operative Bank of Kenya. In Kenya the majority of wireless payments are being done through Safaricom, a telecommunications company.
At the end of 2015, Africa had 557 million mobile phone users, according to the GSM Association, an industry group. Despite the company estimates 84 million of them still pay by cash, Visa’s representatives believe that “those can be converted overnight”.
Users of mVisa make payments by scanning a QR code or using their smart phones. About 1,500 merchants have signed up already and Kenyan lenders with units in the region expressed their intentions to introduce the system in neighbouring nations.
Visa is in talks to launch the product in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda by the end of November 2016 and expects to have the first Nigerian bank signing up by end-2016. It has also held “a number of conversations” in South Africa, according to Visa’s head for sub-Saharan Africa, Andrew Torre.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now