This is interesting. Enterprise payment platform provider Nomanini has integrated with M-Pesa in Mozambique enabled via its local country partner, Mozambique Mobile Solutions (MMS), to allow its merchants to use mobile money agents as a means of topping up their virtual vending accounts on Nomanini terminals.
Designed especially for informal markets, Nomanini’s mobile payment terminals allow vendors to sell everything from prepaid airtime to electricity and insurance in the form of vouchers.
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Integration with Vodacom’s M-Pesa service in Mozambique allows merchants to deposit cash with M-Pesa agents in order to top-up their terminals. This new method of merchant cash-in is already implemented in the country with several thousand merchants. That means they can be active more of the time and also don’t have to carry as much cash on them.
“We see a strong convergence between what we do at Nomanini and the services offered by mobile money providers,” said Nomanini CEO, Vahid Monadjem. “Integrating with services such as M-Pesa helps make mobile money more accessible to consumers and offers merchants and enterprises in informal markets the opportunity to increase their margins and reduce their working capital requirements. With this integration in Mozambique, we have begun that journey.”
Read more: From proof to pivot: How Nomanini is becoming the future of prepaid sales
According to a press release sent to Memeburn, Nomanini’s goal is to support the integration of the payments ecosystem into the general retail sector by scaling up merchant usage of mobile money in three phases.
“Mini-bulk payments are just the first phase of what we plan to do with mobile money. As part of the second phase, we plan to move into nano-cash/single dollar cash deposits and withdrawals into mobile money wallets, facilitated for the consumer by the merchant. The third phase is for merchants to become comfortable enough with mobile money that they begin accepting mobile money as payment for their own goods,” says Monadjem.
According to Nomanini, the integration doesn’t just benefit merchants using its terminals, but also general consumers and mobile operators. Consumers, it says, will gain from the greater availability of mobile money services, with informal retailers being between 10 to 20 times more prevalent than mobile money agents. This, it believes, increases affordability, as general retailers can afford to transact lower values since they are not dependent on mobile money transactions for margins. For operators, Nomanini helps to increase merchant-side acceptance of mobile money, increasing customer usage.
Update: 30 March – clarification in intro paragraph
