As we winded up 2020, we shared some of our highlights 2020: The Year in Review at Pesapal that kept us going, and here are the stories that defined 2021 for Pesapal.
Our success stories are all geared towards the success of our existing and potential clients. That being so, we got authorization for the Payment Service Provider (PSP) from the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK). This authorization is not only beneficial to merchants but to individual customers as well.
For our existing and potential merchants, it means security measures have been put in place to protect their funds. For the individual customers, there is assurance for credibility from the merchants on our ecosystem.
On that note, our Tanzania branch also received the National Application Service License (AS) from Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA). Which means we are technologically equipped to serve our customers; and that we are efficient and accessible. This is a great achievement as we work towards receiving the BOT license.
Undeniably, technology is changing the landscape of the financial sector. By focusing on bettering the services our merchants are offering, and making sure they are secure and user friendly, we launched a secure Smart POS PDQ dubbed Pesapal Sabi Smart POS for business owners. The Pesapal Sabi Smart POS enables businesses to improve their operations by integrating their everyday sales tools to the payment processing. This allows business functionalities such as accounting, reporting and analytics, inventory management, and generating email receipts to be done on the POS terminal.
When our merchants win, we win. The year 2021 saw us collaborate with merchants for revenue optimization where we partnered on brand activation in the Bars and Entertainment sector. This gave us a chance to connect and engage with the industry leaders and thus develop products that solve the products. It was also a good chance for us to demonstrate new features on our Pesapal Sabi Smart POS to consumers, such as Mpesa STK Push & Mpesa scan to pay.
We also carried out merchant features that allowed our merchants from different business sectors to highlight and market their services to a wider audience. This helped put the merchants in the right space, educating their clients on fast, frictionless, and borderless payments. It also helped us spread the notion that digitalization is inevitable and digital payments are here to stay.
2021 saw us host some game-changing Webinars trademarked "Pesapal Caffe Sessions". These interactive webinars were exciting, engaging, and great learning opportunities for both our audience and us. We managed to inspire our viewers by hosting relevant industry icons as speakers. It also gave us a direct platform to communicate with our existing and potential customers on our digital platforms allowing us to give real-time feedback.
In order to appreciate the amazing work our customer support staff does; we asked a techie to fill in the shoes of a customer service agent. Even though 90 percent of customer service and technical coding roles involve problem-solving and creative thinking, our techie was still caught off-guard. While coding requires silence and sometimes working on projects independently, customer service is the complete opposite, in that customer service roles require someone who can be interrupted easily as there is always someone carrying a conversation and receiving call requests.
As the digitalization of financial services is estimated to continue accelerating at an even more rapid pace, we believe we will continue to use technology to creatively solve problems and digitize to solve more industry problems.
