A lot happens when you work behind the scenes at a technology company like Safaricom.
Because you are also a Safaricom customer, you can see the gaps that can be addressed, how to improve and enhance the products, services and solutions
Safaricom employees were given the opportunity in March 2022 to explore how to address some of these gaps in the company’s products and services at the Fintech Innovation Week. The event brought together 62 teams who were engaged in a hackathon to work on their ideas and then pitch them for development.
After the initial rounds, 20 teams got into a hackathon where they refined their ideas further. Each innovator was linked up with developers, designers and any other engineers that they required to bring their ideas to life.
The theme was “Deepening Customer Engagement Through Co-Creation of Future Payments for Trusted Digitalized World” building up to a Fintech hackathon.
Each team had an innovative digital technology idea that can be applied to optimize operations around financial services and banking.
Three teams emerged winners, and their innovations are likely to be the next big update on the M-PESA super app and therefore part of the future of money.
The first prize went to a quintet of interns: Mary Mbaire, Brandon Kahuho, Brenda Gaceri, Thomas Mwaka and Clement Ngatia.
The Safaricom Newsroom spoke to all three teams to understand how their ideas were born, nurtured and brought to fruition at the hackathon.
- The M-Subscriptions team
Mary, Brandon, Brenda, Thomas and Clement met during the Safaricom Talent Academy at the company in February this year and formed the M-Subscriptions team when the Fintech Innovation Week was announced.
Their idea is the creation of an application for the M-PESA super app to help subscribers manage the services they have signed up for and pay for on a regular basis.
The application would enable users to add their subscription services, schedule dates for payments as well as indicate whether they want to auto deduct or manually pay for their subscriptions.
Clement, who oversaw the sketching and wireframing of the app says the innovation will bring more convenience to users because you only have to set it once hence making it very efficient.
According to Brenda who was in charge of designing the way the app looks to users, known in tech parlance as UI design of the app, their hope as a group is to have M-Subscriptions spread to serve masses across the continent.
The group won a cash prize of KES 250,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Dubai for their proposal.
Here is their story.
- Team Buccaneers
Nixon Kipkorir, Keith Gatanu, Peter Kimeli and Peter Kiptanui had an idea named Quick Pay, that speeds up payments at points where there are usually large numbers of people making payments, such as supermarkets and toll stations.
According to DevOps Engineer Kiptanui, who oversaw the backend and the way users see and experience Quick Pay, this new feature will save everyone their much-needed time due to its efficiency, especially in places like school opening days or holidays like Christmas.
“In order to checkout, customers have to go through a multi-step process to complete transactions adding to the long queues. The market is also losing because they cannot serve as many customers at a counter as they would wish to,” he says.
This team is no stranger to great innovations and winning. During the 2021 Safaricom Open Innovation Week, the team innovated and presented an award-winning feature, M-chango, which proposed a new way of digitizing and easing how users make welfare contributions via social media platforms, especially on WhatsApp. This idea bagged the first position prize of KES 2,000,000 and laptops for the team.
This time, they won KES 150,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Diani.
Here is their story.
- Rafiki
For anyone running FinTech, it is important to know your customer, which means that you have to verify their identity and understand their history.
This is not only good for the business but a requirement by law, and the reason regulators are keen to see that everyone running a FinTech platform abides by the Know Your Customer (KYC) guidelines.
Godfrey Kimani, Gilbert Ngeywo, Mark Mutua, Rosemary Koech and Silvester Kahuthia had all these in mind as they built M-Ngao, a regulation technology platform to work on identity as a service.
Rosemary, the team lead, explains: “To operate in financial sectors, one can use the M-PESA app to construct a layered identity and leverage Safaricom and M-PESA’s trustworthiness.”
Their innovation can be used for different things but they chose the stock market and built the service in a way that would make it faster and easy to access.
The team believes the product would allow everyone access to the financial sector as well as improving on the speed of transactions.
They won 2nd runners-up position at the hackathon and walked away with KES 100,000 and merchandise.
Here is their story.
