Safaricom and payments company Pesapal are expanding digital payment options for Kenyan merchants and consumers, introducing QR-code and contactless transactions through Pesapal’s point-of-sale terminals.
The partnership brings Safaricom’s M-PESA platform together with Pesapal’s merchant infrastructure at the physical checkout, as the companies seek to reduce the steps involved in completing everyday payments.
Under the new Dynamic Scan-to-Pay service, customers can scan a QR code displayed on a Pesapal terminal. The merchant’s details and transaction amount are then populated automatically, allowing the customer to verify the information before authorising the payment.
Customers using NFC-enabled smartphones can instead tap their devices against a Pesapal terminal to complete a transaction.
The rollout is part of Safaricom’s broader effort to develop M-PESA beyond its traditional role as a mobile money service and into a wider payments platform. The company is also introducing AI Pay through My OneApp, allowing customers to scan printed or handwritten receipts and, where the information is available, automatically identify the relevant Till or PayBill number and payment amount.
The technology is intended to address one of the persistent sources of friction in mobile payments: manually entering merchant and transaction information.
“As the way Kenyans shop and transact continues to evolve, we are focused on ensuring that M-PESA evolves with them,” said James Maitai, Safaricom’s group chief technology officer.
Safaricom said its Scan-to-Pay service is already available at more than 60,000 merchant outlets and that it plans to increase that figure to 500,000 over the next year. The expansion will be supported by the growing deployment of Pesapal point-of-sale devices.
For Pesapal, the agreement extends its role as payment infrastructure for businesses while giving merchants using its terminals access to M-PESA’s large customer base.
The companies are entering a market where mobile payments are already deeply embedded in consumer and business transactions. Safaricom said M-PESA had 41 million customers and generated more than KES182.7 billion in revenue in its 2026 financial year.
The challenge for the next stage of Kenya’s digital-payments market is therefore less about persuading consumers to use mobile money than making the experience increasingly seamless across different points of sale.
Pesapal operates in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Zambia, providing payment and business-management services to merchants and enterprises.
