Not too long ago, we saw the three main telcos in Kenya; Safaricom, Airtel, and Telkom Kenya come together to enable mobile money interoperability within their respective services. With that, it is now easy to transfer money from your mobile wallet to anyone in Kenya, irrespective of which mobile wallet they’re using.
Today, we’ve seen yet another monumental milestone on this front as the three have once again come together to enable merchant interoperability. With this, Airtel Money and T-Kash customers are able to pay for goods and services to merchants with M-PESA Till numbers.
In this post, we quickly walk you through the process of paying for goods and services from other mobile wallets directly into the merchant’s Lipa Na M-PESA account.
How to Lipa Na M-PESA using Airtel Money
To Lipa Na M-PESA from your Airtel Money wallet, simply ensure you have an active Airtel Money Wallet with sufficient balance. Then, follow these steps.
- Dial *222#
- Select Lipa na M-PESA, Equity & Airtel
- Select M-PESA Till
- Enter M-PESA Till number
- Enter Amount
- Authorize transaction with Airtel Money PIN and that’s it.
Read More:
- How to send money from T-Kash to M-PESA and vice versa
- Here Are the Updated M-Pesa Transaction Charges for 2022
How to Lipa na M-PESA using T-Kash
To pay for goods and services on M-PESA using your Telkom Kenya line, ensure you have an active T-Kash wallet and sufficient funds then follow these simple steps.
- Dial *160#
- Select – Buy goods and services
- Select- Use Mpesa Till Number
- Enter the merchant’s M-PESA Till number
- Confirm transaction using your T-Kash PIN and that’s it!
So this is the first phase of interoperability and it allows for these two options, Airtel Money and T-Kash to Lipa Na M-PESA Till Number. The second phase should see M-PESA customers able to pay for goods and services to merchants on Airtel Money and T-Kash. Timelines for this second phase haven’t been made available.
Down the road, there is a possibility that we might see this option added to the carriers’ respective mobile apps, My Airtel and T-Kash app respectively but for now, there is no word on it. Additionally, the SIM Toolkit menus haven’t been updated to support this feature so the USSD Code method is your only option right now.
We might also like to add that, you’d be wise not to entirely depend on this feature, at least not just yet. Have some money on your M-PESA line, or walk around with some cash as there are bound to be teething pains. In the period of testing, we ran into multiple ‘Application Down’ errors so keep that in mind.
