Isn't that what they claim? Read Collymore's statement again.

This strategy would hardly work on Equity Bank though. It's not that Equity wants to make its money doing money transfer. It's more that Equity is defending its turf from SCOM and M-PESA. If Equity gives free or almost free calls and SMS to their clients then that could be a huge problem for SCOM.

SCOM has been lucky to be competing with mostly Indian companies who have shot themselves in the foot by failing to get their Kenyan employees to have a sense of ownership in their company and therefore always seem foreign.

Equity Bank is as Kenyan as it gets and has smart people and the ambition required to compete with SCOM. It's going to be interesting to see how this fight plays out.

Safaricom has nothing to lose, Equity has something to gain.

Safaricom is the telecommunication company that revolutionalized financial services, carrying with it virtually all banks, consumers and consumer facing businesses.

Equity is the bank that revolutionalized banking to Wanjiku, giving a bank account to hitherto unbanked Wanjikus.

What Equity wants is recapture pretty Wanjiku that it worked so hard to install in its Simba but was seduced mercilessly by the Green Giant.

The Green Giant will not let Wanjiku go without a fight.

At the end of the day Equity may recapture some of its Wanjiku clientelle from Mpesa but will never pry away SMEs mobile products, Utilities payments, Conventional voice and data from Safaricom.

These two companies are profitable, innovative but simply do not operate in the same space.

@sparkly i kindly beg to defer.There exists substantial overlap between Mpesa and the business model finserve is rolling out.Mobile banking is Mpesa fort and had they built on it faster they would have been offering other innovative products.Finserve wants to get a slice of this while offering the convenience of it being linked to a bank thus services like bigger loans,insurance,bank transfers etc.

The way I see it,it's like having 2 personal bank accounts,there always is one that is more active thus generating more revenue for the bank while the other less active still generates marginal income for the bank. So one bank gets the loot,the other a few coins but they both make money

Only thing that is certain.. Safaricom will become less profitable especially due to opening up of its mpesa agent network to other MTS providers. Still cant believe Scom used to charge over 10bob per minute on a voice call and immediately reduced it when the Airtel price wars kicked in.. If Safaricom was a person, he/she would be in jain for extortion!