Alibaba’s AliExpress signs deal with Safaricom’s M-Pesa
AliExpress.com, run by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, will allow Kenyan shoppers to buy goods on the site using M-Pesa in a matter of weeks
Nairobi — Kenya’s Safaricom said on Tuesday that it had secured a deal to use its M-Pesa mobile payment service for online shopping on one of Alibaba’s platforms, part of a move to expand its most profitable product beyond Kenya. AliExpress.com, run by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, will allow Kenyan shoppers to buy goods on the site using M-Pesa in a matter of weeks. M-Pesa was launched more than a decade ago to offer Kenyans without bank accounts a network to transfer cash via mobile phones. It now offers a range of payment services, loans and savings to more than 21-million people in Kenya and has been copied abroad. AliExpress.com is an online shopping portal for businesses and retail customers. "As our customers get more digital, they want to shop in a more digital kind of a format, that's why we are seeing e-commerce growing," said Safaricom's chief customer officer, Sylvia Mulinge. Under the deal, Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba that runs the portal's payment ...
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