Safaricom has introduced Fuliza Ya Pochi, an overdraft facility that gives more than one million qualifying Pochi La Biashara merchants access to short-term credit when their mobile money balances are insufficient.
The product allows merchants to pay suppliers, make Buy Goods purchases, send money and settle utility bills, with credit limits set according to each business’s transaction activity and repayments automatically deducted from future payments into their Pochi wallets.
Peter Ndegwa, Group Chief Executive of Safaricom PLC, said the service helps micro-businesses manage daily cash-flow gaps that can lead to missed sales, delayed stock purchases or postponed supplier payments.
Eligibility requires merchants to have actively used Pochi La Biashara for more than six months, and the facility can be accessed through the Pochi Mini App on My OneApp or by dialing *334#.
The launch follows Safaricom’s recent measures to lower transaction costs for Pochi La Biashara users, including zero-rating customer payments up to KSh200 and cutting fees by 50 per cent on payments above that amount, with a maximum charge of KSh50, for a three-month period.
Safaricom earned KSh6 billion from its Fuliza service in the financial year ended March 2026, a 46 per cent increase from the previous year, and M-Pesa generated more than KSh182.7 billion in revenue in the same period.
Pochi La Biashara currently serves over two million micro-merchants, providing a channel for separating business and personal funds and facilitating daily transactions across Kenya’s informal economy.
