Safaricom’s M-pesa system seems to be showing signs of over-subscription, says Business Daily.

 

Agents stated they were dealing with float issues frequent periods of network congestion due to them having limited service usage during peak hours. Another agent that Business Daily spoke to said some unscrupulous agents wouldn’t process requests for deposits as this will not generate any commissions for them.

Generally, agents are facing problems related to the fact that M-Pesa’s growth rate has largely surpassed projected figures for its uptake. Currently, 4.5 million users are subscribed to the service. Correspondingly, the agent network has grown as well, resulting in just below 5,000 now.

The Float, that indicates the amount of money that an agent has in the account, is e-money that must match a corresponding amount within the official M-Pesa account held at Commercial Bank of Africa. Only those agents, who have the equivalent amount being sent or received in electronic form inside their phone, are able to give or receive money.

Commenting on the problems, an agent owning five M-Pesa outlets said, “One loses physical cash especially in the rural areas when people withdraw cash sent to them.  So the head-office can use the deposited physical money to send to these areas where people are withdrawing cash to replace that before the close of the fiscal/financial month.”

Another big issue rose when customers deposited more cash than was deposited at an outlet, the e-money float was reduced, sometimes to the point where the agent ran out.  However, this problem found a solution known as float balancing. This enables agents to move float from stores with excess e-money to those that were running out using a web monitoring tool.

Source: Business Daily Africa