Visa Incorporated Manager for Sub Saharan Africa, Victor Ndlovu/cfm
NAIROBI, Kenya, Feb 17 – The government could easily save millions of shillings if a proposal by global payments technology company Visa is accepted and implemented.
Visa Incorporated Manager for Sub Saharan Africa, Victor Ndlovu, says the government could cut costs by capping spending limits for its frequently-traveling staff to curb corruption.
“We’ve started to engage the ministries of Finance and Trade into discussions to help them to understand what we did in the Dominican Republic, and how we can tailor the proposal to suit Kenya’s needs. We did that in Rwanda because they have their own vision, to have 60 percent of all transactions being done electronically,” Ndlovu said.
Ndlovu, who was speaking during a media sensitisation workshop on Friday morning, added the company has acquired Fundamo, a mobile transactions technology firm.
Fundamo’s platform enables the delivery of mobile financial services to unbanked and under-banked consumers around the world, including person-to-person payments, airtime top-up, bill payment and branchless banking services.
“We have already started testing in one of our markets and we have also mandated the local banks to comply by October 2012 because we need to give banks time to also work this technology into their systems,” he added.
At the same time, he has called on banks to invest in security technology and to introduce the use of chip and PIN cards to help curb card fraud.
He said if all banks started issuing chip and PIN cards, it doubles the level of security between the banks and their clients thus saving the banks billions of shillings in card fraud re- imbursements.
The company is re-locating its regional head office from South Africa to Kenya by the end of July.
There are 1.9 billion Visa card users in the world.
