The virtual card is a timely service tailored to meet the increasing needs of Kenyans using global apps and shopping websites for entertainment, retail, business, and even when travelling abroad.
The virtual card will provide services in more than 200 countries.
Telecommunication service Safaricom and Visa have partnered to introduce the first M-Pesa GlobalPay Visa Virtual payment card.
The virtual card will provide services in more than 200 countries allowing millions of M-Pesa to pay for goods outside the country and protect its customers from incurring forex conversion costs.
In addition, transactions will be subject to current M-Pesa limits of Sh150,000 per transaction and Sh300,000 per day at the prevailing forex rates.
“Partnering with Visa to provide the M-Pesa GlobalPay Visa virtual card, we are looking to bridge the gap for our customers who would like to use M-Pesa anywhere across the world,” said Peter Ndegwa, CEO, Safaricom.
Customers can activate their M-Pesa GlobalPay Visa Virtual card by selecting M-PESA GlobalPay, under the “Pay” or “Grow” option.
They can also activate it by dialling *334# then selecting option 6 for “Lipa na M-PESA” followed by “M-PESA GlobalPay”.
The two firms are also targeting to launch the M-Pesa GlobalPay Visa Virtual Card in Tanzania, DR Congo, Mozambique, Lesotho and Ghana.
These new virtual card payment services are meant to meet the growing online payment both locally and globally.
In addition to providing customers with the freedom and convenience of transacting across the world, the virtual card builds on M-Pesa’s security, by empowering customers to generate a unique Card Verification Value (CVV) for a 30-minute period.
Customers will key in their M-Pesa PIN each time they generate a CVV.
This feature ensures all the details of the card required to perform a transaction are only known to the customer.
According to the Vice President of Visa and General Manager for East Africa, Corine Mbiaketcha, the deal will boost Visa’s efforts to penetrate more African markets riding on the M-Pesa platform.
“Visa is committed to expanding the payments ecosystem across Africa by opening up the global marketplace for every single consumer. This partnership with Safaricom is an important step in helping to achieve
this,” she said.
The deal is expected to shore Safaricom’s earnings from the mobile money services at a time M-Pesa revenues fell for the first time in five years.
“We remain optimistic that this partnership will go a long way in opening the global e-commerce market to Kenya’s significant unbanked and underbanked population,” said Mbiaketcha.
In 2020, Safaricom witnessed a 2.1 percent drop from Ksh84.43 billion to Ksh82.56 billion in the same month.
Last year’s earnings from M-Pesa marked the first drop from the revenue stream in five years given that it has been growing by at least Sh9 billion annually since 2018.
Safaricom is betting on the increased use of cashless payments that took root in 2020 following the outbreak of Covid-19 to grow its reach across Africa and globally.
