M-PESA 1Tap will be available to all Lipa Na M-PESA merchants and customers and aims to make it faster and easier to make and receive cashless payments. The service also increases the accuracy and privacy of Lipa Na M-PESA by ensuring that payments are delivered to a matching merchant.

“As a trusted, easy and convenient cashless payment solution for more than 70,000 businesses in Kenya, Lipa Na M-PESA is ready to advance to become a more seamless solution. M-PESA 1Tap builds on a strong foundation built on 10 years of learning and feedback from both our customers and merchants. We hope it will transform the world of cashless payments,” said Bob Collymore, CEO, Safaricom.

M-PESA 1Tap will be progressively rolled out to leading supermarkets, petrol stations, and restaurants.

Some of the merchants where customers can now make payments with M-PESA 1Tap include Shell, Naivas, Choppies, KenolKobil, KFC, Oil Libya, Total and QuickMart. The merchant solution currently involves an NFC based reader integrated to merchants Lipa Na M-PESA tills.

“At Vivo Energy we are always looking for ways of improving the offer we give to the customers. We are therefore in this innovation journey and are glad to partner with Safaricom in giving our customers convenience as they make their purchases,” said David Mureithi, Acting Managing Director Vivo Energy Kenya and Executive Vice President Vivo Energy East and South Region.

Customers will initially have the option of obtaining an M-PESA 1Tap wristband, phone sticker or card which will allow payment integrations with M-PESA 1Tap merchant terminals. More convenient M-PESA 1Tap solutions are set to be rolled out in future. The tags are available from Safaricom shops and dealers from Ksh. 20.

“Naivas has been at the forefront of technology adoption, which is why we are happy to deploy M-PESA 1Tap. We believe it will greatly improve our customer experience by increasing the speed, accuracy and privacy when paying by M-PESA at our outlets,” said Simon Mukuha, Managing Director, Naivas.

To make a payment, a merchant will key in the payment amount into their device, tap the customer tag, and the customer will then key in their PIN on their phone to validate the payment. This cuts down the steps involved from more than eight steps using the M-PESA tool on SIM cards to just one step for the customer.

M-PESA 1Tap was launched in May 2017 in Nakuru County, with more than 90,000 customers and 2,000 merchants taking up the service. Mobile cashless payments have increasingly grown popular in Kenya, with Central Bank of Kenya statistics showing that they accounted for 72.8 percent of cashless payments by value and 88 percent by number of cashless transactions in July 2017.