Safaricom has signed up more than four million customers to its new overdraft facility Fuliza, extending $170 million in credit since its launch in January.
The new overdraft facility was born out of necessity, explains Bob Collymore, CEO of Safaricom, during an interview with Euromoney in Nairobi.
“When we looked closely at the data we collected from our M-Pesa customers, we saw that on a daily basis, over half of them were not able to complete transactions because the customers didn’t have enough money in their accounts.
“But we know that these people are not poor – that they have the money. This is because the data shows that two days later, these transactions were usually completed. Fuliza aims to close this gap,” he says.
M-Pesa, Safaricom’s mobile money-transfer service, has a base of 21 million active customers. Ideally, the company would want all of them to use the overdraft facility, says Collymore..
It is revolutionary – like nothing we have seen in Kenya so far - George Bodo, banking analyst
Algorithms based on historical M-Pesa transactions are used to set overdraft limits.