Equity Bank Fires Google as Battle for cashless transport Intensifies

Kenya's transport industry is ripe for cashless payments and the players are gearing off for a face-off. Bebapay which is powered by google wallet was the first to announce entry into the market. Bebapay is being operated by Equity bank, the biggest bank in Africa by customer base with eight million customers. The move to cashless has been a tag of war between commuters, Transport operators and the government. Initially Bebapay was just a card that could only enable customers to travel and get reports of bills via their phones, the bus conductor would use an android phone to complete the transaction via NFC. But now Equity is dropping the NFC powered card by Google and embracing EMV through  the new Equity prepaid Master card that will be able to compete with KCB  PEPEACARD . As the transport sector is getting ready to go fully cashless  the banks don't want to be left behind and want a piece of the pie in processing the transactions before they hit the merchants collection accounts. That leaves the my1963 card which is being operated by Safaricom,  Kenya's largest mobile network operator, and COOPERATIVE bank's M-Nauli card, both these cards are NFC enabled. Safaricom has twenty million subscribers and operates the market leader mobile money service, Safaricom is not about to let go of this opportunity in the transport industry, which is worth a whooping 200 billion shillings annually. Equity through Google sent its 700,000 Bebapay holders this message on February 14th. 'Dear customer, the Bebapay service will be discontinued on 15th March 2015. You can either replace your card with the new Equity prepaid MasterCard for free, finish your card balance by March 15th or get a refund by March 28'

there has been a massive activation drive by both Equity and KCB to get as many customers as possible to use their cards. The National Transport and Safety Authority had announced last week as the deadline for Cash transport. However , most of the cards transactions failed and the deadline was pushed to a later date.