Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) has warned consumers against making third-party payments.
Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) has warned consumers against making third-party payments.
According to the power distributor, customers will buy tokens exclusively from them beginning Thursday.
Kenya Power had contracted nine companies and two banks to sell the power units to customers on prepaid meters, which accounted for about 10 per cent of the company’s power sales.
However, the firms’ contracts expire on August 31 and are not renewable.
In a notice, the firm said effective September 1, customers will only buy tokens from Kenya Power and pay through mobile money, specifically M-Pesa, as well as its banking halls.
“Please note that no other third-party agent is authorised to offer these services on behalf of KPLC. The company will therefore not take liability for any transaction conducted through any other platform,” said the company in the statement.
— Kenya Power (@KenyaPower_Care) August 31, 2022
KCB Bank, which had been acting as one of the vendors, notified its customers that they would no longer be able to buy prepaid tokens from its mobile banking and Vooma platforms. The lender added that it was working on resolving the matter with Kenya Power.
Postpaid electricity customers will have the option of paying through a pay bill number or 15 banks, with plans to increase the number of banks that can collect funds for Kenya Power from this category of customers.
Ali Hussein Kassim, a Fintech expert in Africa, says KPLC’s move is a blessing in disguise, calling on all stakeholders to come together to clean up the mess.
“Utilities like Kenya Power form an integral part of the FinTech ecosystem, not just in Kenya but worldwide. When such billers arbitrarily withdraw application programming interfaces (APIs) for third parties in the financial services sector, they invariably hurt the industry,” he says.
“The problem with this particular biller (KPLC) has, unfortunately, been the fact that these services have been less than transparent, allowing insiders to play the role of brokers and making it difficult for Open Systems to play a role.”
In July 2022, Kenya Power announced plans to introduce a new platform enabling customers to share electricity tokens.
