When I said I was on the right side of life banking with Equity and using Safaricom’s M-Pesa, I was 100% sure of what I was saying. Now, the two giants have joined hands to make the most incredible service in mobile money worldwide, a bank account you can open, operate, save, withdraw, access loans and micro-financing and any other service within it just from your mobile phone. Not WAP enabled phones or complicated methods of getting that achieved but the world famous STK service from Safaricom, M-Pesa.

M-Kesho (I still dont get the name – M is definitely for mobile, Kesho is Swahili for tomorrow so combining the two…I guess its the future banking) is the new baby in town.

From my view, its a great product especially for the unbanked and those who find it difficult to access loans. While banking services are important, lots of Africans have no access to it due to poor infrastructure, lack for value of banking, processes involved in our banking systems, requirements and all that. During the short while that M-Pesa has run, its managed to handle more transactions in a day only in Kenya than Western Union handles in the entire world. It is proof that there is need and that innovation can be greatly used to improve the livelihood of the common man whose income is way less than average. So now you can open an account with only Kshs. 100 which is roughly about $1.25 and no operating cost. This for me makes up what we need to bring our economy to scale.

M-Pesa is serving over 10 million people in Kenya of all classes. That is where the mark has been drawn. I like what Michael Joseph has done with Safaricom and the fact that they are huge and not developer friendly does not make me like them any less. Safaricom has played its role in society. Thanks to Safaricom, there are more internet users in Kenya now.

That said and done, Safaricom can do better -  by working with local developers and allowing them to develop on their platform. Safaricom needs to learn from the likes of Apple, the success of the iStore is because each developer is given an equal chance. We can turn round Africa if only corporates were not as selfish as they are currently. Still on Safaricom, we would like to see you promote local websites in the same strength you are putting behind Facebook with the Safaricom Live brand. Lets hope someone from Safaricom actually sees and forwards this link to someone “BIG”!

Congrats on the launch to both Safaricom and Equity – BTW…none of their websites had information about this by the time I started to write this blog. Pull up your cables people!

Michael Joseph, CEO, Safaricom Ltd, has asked the government, specifically the licensing and regulatory commission, CCK to treat each operator equally and charge new players same fees Safaricom paid for their 3G licence, a whooping $25 million.

Its a nice thing that Safaricom has served us with all its might, while enjoying a monopoly and making a killing out of it. Safaricom has so far recovered their license fee and made more than enough profits from the users by over charging and in my view, we should let other players get easier terms since they have lesser subscribers and times have changed. Bandwidth is cheaper and more available too.

I really do not think its fair to the consumers not to allow the other players come in with easier terms because Safaricom will continue to control the prices.

As much as Safaricom has the best mobile internet service, its also the most expensive available. CCK, do us good by licensing other players and lets see where this takes our country.