When M-PESA was launched in March 2007, it was a marvel to most Kenyans who could not understand how money would be sent in the form of a mobile text.

In April 2007, a month after it was launched, the platform was yet to reach 20,000 users, but that number would multiply by 50 and stood at more than one million by November of that year.

It was revolutionary, but growth made some gaps more evident – it was very easy to send money to the wrong person.

Customers struggled with erroneous transactions because while they could see the name of the recipient, convincing them to return the wrongly sent cash was often tedious.

Things became so bad that in a day, Safaricom used to receive 12,000 calls from M-PESA customers seeking reversals for transactions made to the wrong recipients.

A team was tasked to develop Hakikisha, which in English means ‘confirm’, which enables M-PESA users to confirm the name of the person to whom they are transferring money before completing the transaction. This also applies when customers are making payments to Lipa Na M-PESA and agent withdrawals.

To develop the product, the M-PESA team went back to the drawing board and worked with various stakeholders.

“We had to work with our customers, listening to their insights and experiences before Hakikisha, the call centre teams who deal with the customers on the ground, and the tech teams to see if what the customers want can be achieved. Hakikisha would not have been successful without each and every one of those teams,” said Virginia Wawira, Product Manager, M-PESA Go.

However, using the first version of Hakikisha proved challenging as customers did not understand it.

“Initially, the call to action was not very clear as customers were expected to dial the number 1 in 15 seconds to stop a transaction, failure to which Safaricom automatically wires the money. So, we found out that the product was not working for some customers as they did not know what to do,” said Anita Kaunga, Product Manager, M-PESA Consumer Payments.

This saw the product iterated to the current version, where the Hakikisha pop-up message requires a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response.

“Everyone understands what ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ mean. If it’s ‘Yes’, you want the transaction to complete, and ‘No’, you want to cancel the transaction,” said Anita.

While Hakikisha was launched to help customers avoid erroneous transactions, some have found other uses for the service. For instance, some people use it to obtain other users’ information, which the organisation works round the clock to protect.

“For every product that we release, especially in M-PESA, we have to consider any security concerns and also ensure that we protect our customers from any fraudulent activities that might come with that product,” said Virginia.

For Hakikisha the number of times one can check a potential recipient’s names is capped at five times a day. When you cancel transactions five times, you get barred from using the service for 48 hours.

With product management, every day is a chance to refine customers’ experience, and the M-PESA team plans to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve Hakikisha.

“We’re looking at how we can employ Artificial Intelligence into our systems such that we are able to detect the amount of data that we have, the patterns of how you do transactions, and we’re able to predict when you’re about to send money to the wrong person or pay to the wrong till or Paybill, and we can help you prevent that,” said Virginia.

Secondly, the M-PESA team continues to carry out proactive market and user research to understand and meet the customers’ needs.

With the large amounts of data Safaricom processes with products like M-PESA, they can pick up trends and note the numbers that customers frequently send money. With that, they can formulate algorithms that can guide customers.

As M-PESA turns 18, the team at Safaricom sees Hakikisha as one of the most impactful inventions in improving customer experience in all payment journeys.

It has also worked to reduce the number of erroneous transactions.

“After the launch, we have seen the reversals drop from 12,000 a day to 4,000,” said Anita.