Safaricom has launched an M-Pesa Bill Management service targeting schools, landlords, utilities and other businesses with repeat payments where they can present and receive pending payments from customers, and issue electronic receipts.
For schools, the Bill Manager platform will enable management to customise the different type of fees such as tuition, lunch, transport, school trips among others, and also to send fee reminders to parents and guardians.
Landlords and property agents can send rent payment reminders and reconcile any received payments.
For utility providers such as water and internet providers, the service will enable them to automatically bill their customers who will have a way to easily view and manage pending bills.
“The service will equally empower millions of M-Pesa PayBill customers with better record-keeping by providing digital receipts for each payment. Our ambition is to empower both businesses and our customers easily manage and keep track of payments,” said Peter Ndegwa, CEO, Safaricom.
All payments received through M-Pesa are instantly reconciled on the platform, which also provides an option to manually add payments.
Customers using the service will instantly receive an SMS reminder when a new bill is generated or when the bill is due.
The platform will be offered free to all businesses with a Lipa Na M-Pesa Pay Bill.
SMS bill requests and invoices will be automatically generated and sent by the system at no cost to the business.
All M-Pesa customers can manage their bills through the Bill Manager option under Lipa Na M-PESA on *334#, and on the upcoming M-PesaApp.
Besides automatically receiving invoices and receipts, customers can equally query pending bills at any time.
