Kenyan operator Safaricom announced talks with retail giant Amazon about accepting payments through its m-Pesa mobile money platform in the country, Bloomberg reported.
Discussions about the use of the mobile money service in Amazon’s online sales channels were presented by Peter Ndegwa, CEO of Safaricom (picture), during the press conference on the operator’s annual results.
He found that connections with companies like Amazon are becoming increasingly important in a number of areas, including with reference to cloud services.
M-Pesa accounts for 33 percent of the operator’s sales and is used by its customers for a number of domestic and international transactions.
Safaricom has already signed a number of contracts with international players to expand the use of the system, including Visa, Alibaba, PayPal and Western Union.
The news came when the Vodafone subsidiary announced its performance by the end of March. Net income declined 6.8 percent year over year to KES 68 billion (US $ 635.3 million) and sales were unchanged at KES 250.35 billion.
As with his peers around the world, profits have been affected by lockdown measures from Covid-19 (coronavirus). Factors influencing the operator included waiving fees for peer-to-peer mobile money transactions under KES 1,000.
Sales for m-Pesa were down 1 percent, with the company also seeing declines in messaging and voice services, which was partially offset by an increase in data usage.
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