Mobile banking has increasingly grown in the country in the last few years. Most Kenyans have grown fond of mobile banking because of its accessibility and efficiency. On March 2015, the Kenya Commercial Bank partnered with Safaricom and introduced the mobile banking platform, KCB-Mpesa. Since then, the customer base grew from four million to fourteen million and is constantly increasing. The platform enabled users an opportunity to save, borrow and transact money from anywhere in the country. The revamp of KCB-Mpesa at Radisson Blu, Nairobi was attended by the ICT Cabinet Secretary, Hon. Joe Mucheru; KCB Group CEO, Joshua Oigara and Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore.
The new and improved platform will:-
- Have faster transaction speeds – Customers will have an easier time accessing loans offered at 4.08% interest rate.
- Enable same day borrowing, repayment and borrowing again – Operations will have close to real-time processing speeds.
- Have more borrowing and saving options – Customers will be able to open a target savings account and top up the same day. They will also receive the same amount of money borrowed with the interest to be added on top on repayment.
- More augmented features – Customers will be able to rollover their outstanding loans by a month thereby increasing the options and time to pay back the loan.
- Top-up loans – This feature will give customers the capability to borrow multiple loans without necessarily clearing the old outstanding loans in the same month.
- Holiday Season Promotion – The holiday season promotion will run from 18th December 2018 to 17th January 2019 for thirty-one days. The promotion will enable customers to borrow loans at 0% interest for every week provided the loan is paid back by midnight the same day.
- The Fixed Deposit and Target Saving Accounts – The fixed deposit account will allow customers to lock up their savings for up to twelve months while the target savings account will enable them to set personal financial targets and make deposits toward achieving them. With either any of the two, customers will earn an interest of up to 6.3%.
The KCB Group CEO pointed out the bank’s commitment to embrace innovation and digitization to constantly keep up with the realm of banking operations. KCB-Mpesa moved to the new system a month ago and has since then served over a million customers and disbursed at least seven billion shillings. Today customers can access loans from as low as KES. 50 to KES. 1,000,000.
To activate and start using KCB-Mpesa;
- Open the Safaricom Tool Kit.
- Select the KCB-Mpesa menu.
- Select loans and savings.
- Select KCB-Mpesa.
- Select the activation menu.
To read more on Mobile Banking here is Investing In Africa’s Mobile Money Innovations: FT Africa Payments Innovation Summit.
