CASHLESS PAYMENTS 3.3 AWARENESS AND USE OF CASHLESS PAYMENT OPTIONS IN THE MATATU SECTOR The effective use of cashless payments depends on several factors. These include the existence of supporting platforms, awareness and acceptance by workers and users, minimal operational challenges, and a favourable environment that ensures efficiency of transactions and regulated transaction costs that favour users. 3.3.1 AWARENESS ABOUT CASHLESS PAYMENT OPTIONS Matatu workers have high awareness about cashless payment options, with the Safaricom M-Pesa being mentioned most. Other options named included BebaPay (run by Equity and Google), the My1963 prepaid card owned by the Matatu Owners Association (MOA), Komiut, LipaFare, the Tangaza Pesa PSV card, the Co-operative Bank M-Nauli, and TekeTeke (Figure B). All except Komiut, LipaFare and TekeTeke were used along with the Kenya Bus Service Abiria and the KCB Pepea platforms during the failed 2014 attempts to introduce cashless payments in Kenya (NMG, 2020)21.
3.3.2 ACCEPTANCE OF CASHLESS PAYMENT OPTIONS There is high acceptance of cashless payment options that are mostly used alongside cash payments. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, most PSVs (94.8 percent) allow passengers to use either cash or non-cash fare payment options (Table 2). However, a few (3.9 percent) accept cash payments only and others (1.3 percent) cashless payments only. The high acceptance of cashless payments – though balanced with cash payments – is attributed to the government directive that encouraged PSVs to enable commuters to pay fare using cashless modes (Nderitu, 2020 )22. In this study, most passengers reported using both cash and cashless payments since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, a sizeable proportion (36.8 percent) preferred to pay by cash only. There needs to be better understanding of the reasons for this, given the important role of passengers in the successful rollout and use of cashless payments – looking, for instance, at how much motivation by crew influences passenger behaviour.
Figure B: Workers’
awareness about cashless fare payment options
Teke teke
1 2
M-Nauli
3
Tangaza LipaFare
4
Komiut
4 11
My1963
12
Bebapay
63
Mpsea 0
20
40
60
80
14
