Kenyan based Pan African bitcoin trading platform, BitPesa has partnered with Airtel and MTN Money mobile wallets weeks after Safaricom asked third party integrator Lipisha Consortium to sever ties with BitPesa.
BitPesa in a blog post disclosed it has gone above and beyond M-Pesa with partnerships all across the continent such as Quickteller and Paga among others. BitPesa also said that signing up more partners is an opportunity for it to expand into more markets as well as sign up more users both in Africa and globally.
The firm said in a blog post that although bitcoin is not as popular in Kenya as hyped, Safaricom’s move was unwelcome as its own M-Pesa was beyond regulation when it launched but for some reasons the Central Bank of Kenya kept its cool and watched from a distance.
However, note that the Kenyan Government is a shareholder in Safaricom and this could have been one of the reasons M-Pesa was left unregulated.
“BitPesa does not compete directly with M-Pesa. Rather, we enable global digital transactions that build bridges between African companies and those around the world. While our first integration and corridor did connect the global bitcoin network to M-Pesa, the BitPesa team quickly added payout and collection corridors to and from Kenyan banks, Nigerian banks, and five other mobile money corridors in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and even Kenya. We have commercial partnerships with some of the biggest companies across the continent, such as Interswitch Ltd and Bharti Airtel,” the firm said in a blog post.
Signing partnerships with Airtel Africa gives BitPesa ease of launch in any of the 20 countries Airtel operates. MTN is also huge in Africa and gives BitPesa customers in countries it could have struggled to launch if it were to depend on M-Pesa.
However, BitPesa’s challenge is not M-Pesa even with the severance, the firm needs to make sure its customers use bitcoins on majority of their transactions and not just money transfers and international online purchases. For BitPesa to think it’s standing in the same light as M-Pesa or even bigger, it needs to educate its users in Africa and even help them see the advantages of bitcoins and have them depend on bitcoins as without fulfilling all the features of a legal tender bit.