Paying with M-PESA at a shop counter no longer has to mean typing in a till number. Since October 1, Safaricom and payments company Pesapal have switched on two faster ways to pay at Pesapal's card machines: Tap-to-Pay and Dynamic Scan-to-Pay.

How Tap-to-Pay works

Customers with a phone that supports NFC, the same contactless technology used by bank cards, hold the phone against a Pesapal terminal. The payment details appear on the phone, the customer checks them and confirms with their M-PESA PIN.

How Dynamic Scan-to-Pay works

The terminal shows a QR code made for that one sale. Scanning it fills in both the merchant's details and the exact amount, so the customer does not type a till number or an amount. That removes the most common causes of payment mistakes, such as a wrong digit or an extra zero.

Where you can use it

TechCabal reports that the rollout starts on about 30,000 Pesapal terminals across Kenya, mostly in restaurants, hotels and some supermarkets. According to Pesapal's founder, quoted by Tech-ish, the service was tested for about six months before being opened to all merchants with compatible machines.

What it costs

Customers pay nothing extra. Reports say the charge is the same as paying through an ordinary M-PESA till number.

Part of a bigger push

The partnership follows Safaricom's addition of a Tap to Pay feature to the M-PESA Business App in August 2026, which lets small traders accept contactless payments on their own phones. The Pesapal deal takes the same experience to card machines already sitting on shop counters.

For Safaricom, the goal is to make M-PESA as quick at the till as a contactless bank card, at a time when card networks and banks are competing for the same customers. For shoppers, it means fewer queues, fewer wrong payments and less time waiting for a confirmation SMS.