Equity Bank takes on Safaricom’s M-Pesa with new money transfer service

Thursday, May 23rd 2013, By Frankline Sunday
Equity Bank has launched an international money transfer service in an attempt to grab a slice of the lucrative mobile money market currently dominated by Safaricom.
In a partnership with global card payments provider Visa, Equity Bank customers will be able to use their Visa enabled cards to send and receive money to anyone, across any bank network internationally.

According to Equity Bank Chief Operations Officer Dr Julius Kipng’etich, the new offer will be a game changer in money transfer services. “We are aware there are other service providers in the market and we are not worried about the competition,” he said. “what we are offering our customers is a convenient, secure and affordable money transfer service.”
  Equity Bank customers will be able to make Visa Personal Payments at any equity bank ATMs, which have already been configured with visa payment menus.
How it works
To send money, all a customer will need to have is the 16 digit Visa card number of the receiver and as soon as the sender completes the transactions, the receiver will be able to receive the money.
Bank customers will be able to use their debit, credit, and re-loadable prepaid visa cards to make cash transfer transactions. Equity Bank will be banking on its partnership with Visa to gain an international footprint and enable its customers transfer money in an international space. The service pits the financial provider, against Safaricom, which has had a firm grip on the mobile money transfer market through M-Pesa product.
In its recently released financial results, Safaricom posted a 94 per cent growth in full- year profits. The company’s total revenue grew by 19 per cent to stand at Sh59.1 billion.
Revenue from the money transfer service M-Pesa was the biggest growth area across the company’s divisions registering a 30 per cent growth and netting in sh21.8 billion in revenues. With 15.2 million customers, nine million of whom actively use M-Pesa at least once every 30 days, the mobile service provider has indicated that it will be leveraging on mobile money transfer to grow its revenues as money from the voice and SMS division dwindle.
“We have actively increased our number of M-Pesa agents by 6,000 over the last few months, closing at 45,540 agents nationwide,” said Mr Bob Collymore, Safaricom chief executive officer.
system upgrade
The company will further upgrade the M-Pesa system to reduce down time and handle more than 600 transactions per second from the 250 transactions handled currently. Through partnerships with local commercial banks and Western Union, M-Pesa further enables users to send money internationally to selected partner banks.
Equity Bank will in turn be leveraging on Visa’s international network to appeal to its customers and woo users from rival service providers. “The partnership with Visa will provide users with interoperability which basically means seamless transaction worldwide despite one’s bank branch as long as they have a Visa enabled card,” said Dougie Henderson, Visa head of emerging products and innovation.
Customers can send and receive up to $2,000 internationally and Sh180, 000 locally, and to Singapore, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the UAE. The Bank will introduce connectivity to Europe and North America soon.