Airtel Money subscribers will recover charges incurred for transfer of money from bank accounts to their respective e-wallets in the form of airtime, as the telco moves to drive an increase in transaction volumes on its e-money platform.
In the announcement made on Thursday, Airtel Kenya Managing Director Ashish Malhotra said customers using Airtel Money to pay to paybills belonging to any network will also enjoy similar benefits.
The development comes as an extension of a programme dubbed ‘Rudishiwa Transaction Fee’ that the firm unveiled in December 2023, allowing customers on Airtel Money to recover all charges incurred when withdrawing money from agents as airtime.
Airtel says the move is in line with its commitment to provide affordable products and services that enhance customers’ convenience.
“When you transfer money from your bank to your Airtel Money wallet, we will see what the bank has charged and we will give it back to you as airtime. This airtime has no expiry so you can keep it for as long as you’d like,” said Malhotra.
The shift comes just a week after the telco announced that it will open its cash tills and paybills for transactions by users of the rival M-Pesa platform from next month, closing a gap that has existed since 2022 when subscribers of Airtel Money and others were allowed to pay to corresponding Safaricom-owned payment platforms.
Airtel Money Managing Director Anne Kinuthia-Otieno last week told this publication that plans are in gear to implement the payments interoperability within the current quarter.
“Currently, our customers can pay into the competition paybills or tills and the reverse is now going to happen where any customer from the competition can also pay to any of the Airtel Money paybills and tills,” she said in an interview.
“By this quarter, we’ll now be able to have seamless interoperability on payments. We are getting a lot of support from our regulator as well as from our competition to be able to open this up.”
Once implemented, the transition will remove a hurdle where M-Pesa subscribers, for example, cannot pay for goods and services through mobile payment platforms owned by Airtel Money.
This comes three years after Safaricom launched a similar system in April 2022, allowing M-Pesa to receive payments from rival platforms on its Lipa na M-Pesa channels.
Airtel’s version of merchant payments services is dubbed Lipa na Airtel Money, but it is much less used compared to Safaricom's which has the largest market share in the mobile money business.
It has, however, been playing catch-up in recent months, recording a sustained growth in subscriber market share which stood at 7.6 percent as of last September, eating into M-Pesa’s which shrunk to 92.4 percent.
