I have been watching this debacle unfold with not a little concern. The Kenyan court has deemed Bitpesa not at risk by Safaricom cutting it off from Mpesa, and as such sees no need to order them to restore access. They will hear the case though...the next session is in mid-January. This is gonna take a while.
BitPesa does not compete directly with M-Pesa. Rather, we enable global digital transactions that build bridges between African companies and those around the world. While our first integration and corridor did connect the global bitcoin network to M-Pesa, the BitPesa team quickly added payout and collection corridors to and from Kenyan banks, Nigerian banks, and five other mobile money corridors in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and even Kenya. We have commercial partnerships with some of the biggest companies across the continent, such as Interswitch Ltd and Bhaarti Airtel. As a company founded in Kenya, we built on M-Pesa; as a pan-African enterprise, we have gone above and beyond M-Pesa.
Unfortunately, a few weeks ago, Safaricom moved to force one of our partners to cease doing business with us in order to keep us off of M-Pesa. We, along with this partner, brought a court case against Safaricom because we believe its actions are an act of intimidation. Today the judge ruled that this case will continue on for further judgment. This could be a lengthy process, as are many legal cases around the world. Importantly, the judge also found that BitPesa is strong enough to sustain its business for the duration of this potentially long trial, even without access to the M-Pesa network.
http://radar.techcabal.com/t/bitpesa-vs-safaricom/3627https://www.bitpesa.co/blog/bitpesa-v-safaricom/
