Merchant Payments

Inclusive Tech Lab > Merchant Payments
Core focus area

Merchant Payments

Advancing mobile money services to enable consumers to transact more frequently using the service is commonly seen a great and vital step into the future for the mobile money industry. Key to success and end user adoption is the industry’s ability to provide consumers with a unified payment experience across mobile money services and merchants.

Despite that, mobile money-led merchant payments is a largely fragmented space today with different service providers acquiring merchants and equipping them to accept payments in individual ‘walled gardens’. This is also true of one of the more recent channels to have entered the fray of merchant payments in emerging markets – QR codes. A multiplicity of technical specifications and fragmented approaches means that this channel too is being rolled out in siloes by mobile money providers, with no single QR code specification that can be accessed by the customers of all services. Moreover, the majority of mobile money transactions are still carried out on the USSD channel, but there appears to be no attempt to enable QR codes to work in USSD heavy contexts.

This workstream seeks to address these challenges.