Our friends at Kopo Kopo forgot their birthday, it happens, especially when you put the client first and remember to send them happy birthday wishes and check on their businesses than your own welfare.
But anyway, two weeks late is not so late in Africa.
Incorporated in Kenya in August 2011, Kopo Kopo has enabled over ten thousand businesses in East Africa accept mobile money as a payment option through an earlier partnership it had with Safaricom to launch Lipa Na M-PESA.
Recently, the firm launched external bank transfer to give businesses an option to either withdraw funds from their Kopo Kopo account to their external bank account.
Kopo Kopo said the move will make it easier for its merchants to pay suppliers, landlords and utility providers among others as the new service will simply transfer cash from a mobile wallet to an external bank account via Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). The merchants can access the money in 1-2 business days.
“We started Kopo Kopo to build a business ecosystem on top of the payments rails. 15,000+ businesses throughout Kenya currently accept Lipa na M-PESA via Kopo Kopo. To serve them, we’ve built logic that enables us to put money in any bank account or M-PESA wallet in the country,” said Kopo Kopo. “Given that transferring money is one of our core competencies, we realized business-to-business and business-to-customer payments were the next frontier.”
Kopo Kopo aims to add functionality to allow merchants to transfer funds to an external M-PESA account to help them cut costs associated with writing cheques monthly, carrying cash which is unsafe and even cutting the spend on couriers.
In June this year, Kopo Kopo announced it had processed its 1,000,000th payment via Lipa na M-PESA, a process it launched in March 2012. The 1m mobile money payments processed were from the firm’s 15,000+ SMEs throughout Kenya. The firm also launched Grow With Us, a cash advance service to its clients.
