Safaricom Puts M-Pesa Tap-to-Pay on 30,000 Pesapal POS Terminals
Safaricom and Pesapal have integrated M-Pesa contactless tap-to-pay and QR payment capabilities across Pesapal's network of approximately 30,000 point-of-sale terminals, representing a rapid expansion of Kenya's merchant payment acceptance infrastructure. The partnership targets eightfold merchant growth within a year and is being described as a major leap in Kenya's contactless payments rollout.
M-Pesa UX: the friction was always the feature killing it
The bottleneck in M-Pesa merchant payments was never trust or reach — it was the sequence: find the Till Number, type it, enter the amount, wait for a prompt, enter a PIN. Five steps to pay for lunch.
Pesapal's 30,000 terminals now collapse that to a tap. The merchant's details and the amount land on the customer's phone automatically; all that's left is a PIN or a fingerprint.
For a platform already processing transactions at continent-scale, that's not a small improvement. Smoother checkout means more payments complete, fewer customers give up and reach for cash. That's the whole game at the point of sale.
3 sources
- Safaricom, Pesapal Expand M-PESA QR And Tap-to-Pay Services · cioafrica.co · T2
- Safaricom, Pesapal bring M-Pesa tap-to-pay to shop tills · techtrendske.co.ke · T2
- Safaricom taps Pesapal’s 30,000 POS terminals to take M-PESA contactless · techcabal.com · T1