Vodacom Tanzania has announced the opening of its M-Pesa Application Programing interface (API) to encourage developers to create innovative new use cases for the mobile payments service.

According to the operator Vodacom M-Pesa has undergone lots of transformation over the years, including a historic migration and upgrade to a second-generation platform “which is robust, faster, more secure and futuristic and more importantly hosted locally in Tanzania for easier maintenance.”

The platform has since then diversified earning accolades and international recognition including a GSMA certification.

Hisham Hendi, MD, Vodacom Tanzania said the opening of the M-Pesa API App is another step to fuel innovation in Tanzania around Fintech and digital business.

"As a company with a vision to digitise Tanzania, we support the innovation ecosystems to come up with solutions that transform lives which is why we have now opened our API's making it easier for your businesses and developers to integrate with our M-Pesa system allowing you to test and enable a wide range of extra capabilities to the system that will bring real change."

"The fully-fledged development infrastructure enables businesses to work independently with their developers and opens space for innovations in re-designing their payment interface independently, creating a customised payment system without directly engaging us," Hisham noted.

Epimack Mbeteni, director, Vodacom M-Pesa said the new open M-Pesa API enhances digital user experience making it more convenient, faster and efficient to integrate payments systems onto the M-Pesa financial services platform.

Mbeteni called on developers to take make use of them and devise new applications for business-to-consumer, consumer-to-business and business-to-business that can be plugged into the open tech backbone.

"With the Open M-Pesa API's it is now faster and easier for you to test the integration of your prototypes with our system, we hope to see more ideas, applications and businesses tap into our vast system to offer more and improved services to customers" he said.

Vodcom describes the latest development as another step towards achieving the operator’s ambition to promote a digital society by fuelling innovation in Fintech and payment ecosystems in Tanzania.