Lipa Na M-pesa is a convenient way to pay for your goods in most settings. The service can be hectic to use is some situations such as paying for what you have bought in a Supermarket or in a store where there is more than one cashier. I am sure you have experienced this when paying using Lipa Na M-Pesa or you were behind someone paying with M-Pesa. The process takes time and after paying, you have to give the cashier your phone number or show them the transaction confirmation message just to confirm that you have paid.
Safaricom is working on ways to make the Lipa Na M-Pesa process smooth in Supermarkets and similar establishments. The company announced this yesterday saying that it is making changes targeting over 2,500 merchants with more than one Lipa Na M-PESA payment point. In such environments, each cashier will be issued with a unique number, this is different from what has been the case so far where each shop had a single till.
With the unique till numbers, when a cashier selects M-Pesa as a mode of payment, the system will reconcile the amount to the latest Lipa Na M-Pesa payment received. With this, there will be no need for you to give the cashier your phone number or show him/her the M-Pesa confirmation message. Hopefully, this will speed up the process and more importantly will improve accuracy and privacy.
“As part of the process, Safaricom and the merchants also re-integrated the till numbers under the new Daraja M-PESA Application Programming Interfaces, which allow for deeper integration.”- Safaricom.
Daraja APIs are designed to help businesses integrate M-PESA into their services. The APIs cut across a number of M-Pesa services both B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to customers). You can learn more about them here.
“Millions of customers and thousands of merchants increasingly prefer Lipa Na M-PESA when it comes to payments. Our enhanced integration of Lipa Na M-PESA for the more than 2,500 merchants will increase the speed and accuracy at which they process cashless payments while also benefiting our customers with increased privacy and accuracy when paying,” said Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, Chief Financial Services Officer, Safaricom.
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