As a web-based mobile payment gateway, we’re often asked if Kopo Kopo aims to provide interoperability between disparate mobile money systems.  Although the short answer is “no”, the question shows that the distinction between integration and interoperability is unclear.  Accordingly, we thought it would be helpful to outline our perspective here.

Integration refers to the connecting of disparate systems.  With regard to mobile money, that could entail gathering transaction data from a mobile money system, transforming it for consumption by a back-office system, and posting it to that back-office system via whatever interface is available.  For example, in order to integrate mobile money system X with back-office system Y, a system might need to do the following:

1) Pull mobile money transactions from a file on an FTP Server, 2) transform the transaction data into a different format (e.g. ISO 8583), and 3) post the transformed data to a back-office system via an API.  

The above would enable an enterprise to accept mobile money payments and have those payments automatically posted to their back-office system.  As a result, that enterprise doesn’t have to worry about manual data entry and reconciliation, which is cumbersome, time-consuming, expensive, error prone, etc.  

When integrating multiple mobile money systems with a common back-office system, the mobile money systems remain disparate.  Put another way, the enterprise has the capacity to interface with multiple mobile money systems, but those mobile money systems don’t interface with one another.

Interoperability refers to the ability of diverse systems to inter-operate, or interface with one another.  With regard to mobile money, that would mean that Customer A on Mobile Money System X could send money to Customer B on Mobile Money System Y (e.g. sending a payment via Safaricom M-Pesa that terminates in the recipient’s Airtel Money account).  In order to enable the above, Mobile Money System X would have to have an agreement with Mobile Money System Y, both with regard to how transactions are communicated and reconciled.  

Kopo Kopo is a web-based integration platform, meaning we enable mobile money systems to interface with back-office systems.  Enabling interoperability between mobile money systems - though exciting to think about - is far beyond our capacity or scope.  

Hope this helps!  If interested in learning more about integration options, feel free to drop us a line at info [at] kopokopo [dot] com.  

Ben Lyon - VP of Business Development