ChessMaster wrote:I never used to like safaricom but now I'm starting to warm up to them a bit. Like Bill Gates said safaricom is like Microsoft and also like Facebook. They both succeeded because they offered people platforms. M-Pesa is a platform for money transfer via mobile phones. To me it's one reason they are still successful. I'm not sure about M-Shwari but they are in the right direction. They have shown they can utilize the information they gather about users to make them money. Information!!!For those who have seen me talk about data scientists,that's what I mean.
Fingerprints won't easily work in Africa.We don't like touching things which are glowing red and especially touching things which other people are continually touching right in front of you.Hygiene.Things I'm keeping my eye on when it comes to Safaricom is the M-Pesa api and how it will be picked up by developers. Next is NFC technology where both orange and safaricom are already preparing for battle because that is a game changer especially to the retail sector.
I thought the reason mpesa is successful is because of its agents distribution - system or platform wise, I find no big difference between what safaricom offers and what orange or airtel have.
on the mpesa api, I think the reason safcom have delayed or failed to release one is because they don't have an idea how it will or is supposed to work - mpesa is a sim card/sms based system and the only place the api can be pluged in is at the sim card level and I dont think they will want to install 3rd party apps on their sim cards. The best they can do is have a message format standard that defines how the notification sms are formated from that developers can work with that.
but I doubt they will be doing that, they already have the paybill thing which they are selling to all an sundry.
fingerprints are already being used by a number of guys, including the medical insurance verification thing and a good number of ngo's that are using the same to id dependants - if the biometric voter thing is a success this year then the uptake might increase