Asilimia Kenya Founder and Operations Manager Tekwane Mwendwa PHOTO | COURTESY The story of Asilimia- translated to percentage in English goes two years back and the platform has now been up and running for about one year. The app is built over existing mobile money infrastructure and currently serves subscribers to Safaricom’s M-Pesa.
Mwendwa does not define Asilimia as a mobile money company but rather sees it as a complementary service to existing infrastructure.
The ensuing Covid-19 pandemic has brought up an unexpected experiment on what zero-rated mobile money transaction would mean on a grand scale.
Tekwane Mwendwa is the founder and current operations manager at Asilimia Kenya, an application freeing up fees on all mobile money transactions.
The story of Asilimia – translated to percentage in English — goes two years back and the platform has now been up and running for about one year.
The app is built over existing mobile money infrastructure and currently serves subscribers to Safaricom’s mobile money service M-Pesa.
“Every Kenyan has had that experience of an insufficient funds to complete a transaction. A lot of emotion is also involved and most of us are familiar with the Kenyan semantics of ‘Na unitumie na ya kutoa’ (Send the cash with a top up to facilitate the withdrawal),” Mr Mwendwa told Citizen Digital in an interview on June 5.
“For me this was very personal. While some may take transactions amounts for granted, realized savings makes a big difference for others. Most people have been slow to adopt to mobile money because of costs.”
Mwendwa stops short of defining Asilimia as a mobile money company but rather sees it as a complementary service.
“We are like what Netflix is to entertainment or what Uber is to the taxi business in Kenya. We are the Amazon of mobile money. Uber is not a transport company while Amazon is not a bookshop but sells books,” he added.
“We are not competition to telcos but rather complement what they offer. It’s like an accessory… say a mouse to a laptop. You can’t buy the mouse and say you don’t need the computer.”Deploying Asilimia requires one to install the application and pay off a monthly one off charge of about Ksh.150 to enjoy the zero rates mobile money transactions.While Mwendwa says the idea is easy to grasp, selling the alternative business model has been no walk on the park as many find the idea preposterous.“When […]