A lot has changed with the advent of Mobile Money; right now Mobile money account holders in the East African region exceed 70 million subscribers and because of this widespread use, it has been used to power numerous innovations in the agriculture, governance, education and the finance sector. Initially, most online businesses thought that Mobile money service providers would provide some sort of payments API to facilitate online collection of payments but to this day no Mobile money service provider is yet to provide a public API (M-Pesa seems to have taken steps in this direction). This delay by Mobile Money service providers to open up a part of their system to the public has contributed to the death of some online businesses and to the birth of others. They may not have released their API to the public but Mobile Money service providers have opened up their systems to a select few companies which have in turn been able to develop some API’s for public consumption. We have compiled a list of some of the payment gateway companies in East Africa that process mobile money payments across an API. Some of these have some sort of exclusive agreement with the MM providers to provide a public API while others have innovatively developed services to do the same. Others worth mention are 3G-DirectPay which serves MTN, Tigo, M-Pesa and Airtel Kenya Mobile money and the following mainly operate in Kenya JamboPay, Epay, iPay and KopoKopo. With the above processors, developers have a variety to choose from depending on their particular needs without a need to build their own custom payment gateway. Image: GSMA
