Banks plan to let customers send money by using mobile phone numbers instead of traditional account numbers through a new PesaLink product.
Under the system a phone number will serve as a simple payment identifier, meaning senders only need the recipient’s number and not the financial institution or account details.
PesaLink Chief Executive Gituku Kirika said the product is ready for rollout and will target more than 200 financial institutions that currently use PesaLink, including banks, Saccos, fintechs and telcos.
He explained that “the idea is to have an alias, which is an identifier that is known to people and will be securely linked to a store of value” and added that participants must now start the mapping.
The approach mirrors proxy-identifier schemes used in India’s Unified Payments Interface and South Africa’s PayShap, which also avoid the need to share long account numbers.
In Kenya a customer will ask a bank or Sacco to map their phone number to an account, creating a PesaLink ID, while institutional users will receive a random number as their ID, and the identifier can be remapped to a different account without changing the ID itself.
Kirika gave an example, saying “if I am your employer and I am paying you, all I need is the PesaLink ID,” and noted that “the ID remains the same but the customer can change the store of value where it is mapped.”
The rollout supports PesaLink’s broader push for interoperability and coincides with its “Lipa na Mbao” campaign, which has seen 25 banks, micro-finance banks and Saccos lower fees from up to KSh250 to a flat KSh20 for transfers between KSh1,000 and KSh999,999 and zero charges for transfers below KSh1,000.
