The National Social Security Fund (NSSF) has announced a partnership with Safaricom in which members will be able to pay for their contributions via Mpesa. This is part of NSSF’s plan to adopt a fully cashless system of payments in a bid to increase convenience and efficiency through the automation and digitization exercise.
Under the new system, NSSF members will now be able to remit their contributions and other payments to the organisation through the Mpesa PayBill 333300. Basically, members will key in their NSSF Account number under the “Account Number” option and complete their transaction without visiting the NSSF offices.
As part of the automation process, NSSF has enabled its members to use a self-service portal through their website or the NSSF Mobile App. Here, one will be able to track their contributions and new members can also register.
Employers with 20 and fewer employees can now also make their staff contributions through Mpesa. To contribute, the employer will need to upload their payroll data to the NSSF portal. Thereafter they will generate the Unique Payment Number (UPN) as part of their payment order. The employer will then keys in the UPN as the Account Number under Mpesa to make the payment.
The Chairman Board of Trustees, NSSF Gen. (Rtd) Dr. Julius Karangi, had this to say, “The platform we are launching today, will make contributing to NSSF easy and effortless, We are aware that we have an enormous task ahead in meeting public expectations in our new role as a pension fund and I wish to assure you that the Fund is striving to enhance the member experience and we have a couple of initiatives that we shall roll out in the next couple of months.”
Mobile payments have emerged as the most popular mode of cashless payments with data from the Central Bank showing almost nine of every ten cashless payments in the country were on the mobile phone as of December 2018. According to a GSMA report, citizens prefer mobile payments for government services due to the associated cost savings of up to more than 75 per cent.
