East African banks are proving slow to embrace the Internet, and systems that take mobile e-commerce payments.
This was reported at the AITEC Banking and Mobile Money Conference in Nairobi last week, as two of Kenya's top techies took to the stage to lay out some of their innovations.
One of the projects that attracted most attention from the country's growing hub of software developers has been the connection of e-commerce to mobile payment systems such as Mpesa, Zap, Orange Money and Yu Cash.
Two of the companies at the forefront in this have been Zege Technologies and Intrepid Data Systems, each of which has developed software for the Kenyan market, making mobile payments faster, and viable across different software platforms, including banks' systems.
Addressing the conference, Kariuki Gathitu, system architect for Zege Technologies, which has developed payment software M-Payer, said the need for this kind of software was being driven by consumers, and shaped around them, for financial companies to increase customer retention and reduce payment delays.
His views were echoed by Phillip Nyamwaya, business development director of Intrepid Data Systems, the company behind online payment service I-Pay.
Nyamwaya noted that Kenyans are reluctant to embrace other e-commerce avenues such as credit and debit cards. “Many are averse to plastic money,” he said. Moreover, e-commerce also suffered from delivery bottlenecks. “We have got an archaic postage system.”
Both innovators are computer science graduates from local universities, but they each educated themselves in software development.
Nyamwaya's I-Pay system has two facets, one for corporate and the other for person-to-person transactions. The corporate system enables companies to pay many clients via mobile phones and track and account for payments made in real-time.
Gathitu admits the computer science degree was not practical enough to turn one into a successful software guru. Instead his philosophy has been: “look for the problem and try to solve it,” he said.
His M-Payer system is built on Ruby on Rails (ROR), a programming language famous for building Twitter. ROR is an open source Web application framework built from Ruby Programming Language.
Gathitu's choice of ROR was influenced by its ease of customisation, scalability and the scope it offered to build applications quickly. “It's a new thing here,” he said. The M-Kesho payment system integrating Equity Bank and Mpesa was his creation.
The latest M-Payer version gives real-time feedback after customers pay bills, meaning customers can pay Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) or Nairobi Water Company even on the deadline for payment.
The current system at KPLC means customers need to pay bills on Mpesa 48 to 72 hours before deadline to give time for reconciliations to be done, and customers who pay on deadline stand to incur penalties or cut-offs. The M-Payer system can also be used to buy stocks and airline tickets.
As online payments require confidentiality, the applications built by Zege Technologies adhere to security standards set by the International Communication Standards, which provides a blueprint for open transaction systems that are hard to hack or compromise security-wise.
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