Why Mobile Payments is the future

Since time immemorial people have always traded and paid for goods. It began with burter trading in the olden days. Then it came to payments by cowrie shells and precious stones. The longest mode of payments has been so far Cash. Different countries have different currencies for instance America with the dollar, British pound and so forth. Even though cash has been the mode of payment that we all in this generation have come to accept another payment method is fast coming into play. This is the mobile or cellphone payment option. This method is fast catching up. 

Consumers of goods and products can make payments to merchants straights from their mobile phones. The mobile phone has become a very easy and convenient method to make payments since majority of people have a phone. 

In Africa and specifically in Kenya one Mobile Network Operator, Safaricom is causing waves with its product Mpesa. Since its inception to the Kenyan market in 2007, the product which first started as a mobile money transfer service has touched the lives of millions. Now at 16million users the mobile money product has evolved to mobile payments to merchants. Millions of transactions totaling to billions of shilllings happen everyday. This makes mobile payments easy to merchants. The merchants are providers of pay Tv, utility providers like water and power. The list is endless as mobile payments can also be made to banks in terms of deposits.

This makes mobile to be the next frontier in terms of payments to merchants and transactions that involve moving money from one point to another.

 In the next article, we will delve more on the advent of smartphones and its direct contribution to mobile payments.