International mobile payment service provider, Tola Mobile, today announces advances in its Tola.wallet product technology which can provide business continuity and operating resilience to its merchants in the rapidly growing African marketplace.

Tola Mobile’s payment service provider services enable companies looking to receive payments from mobile money throughout Africa. A single API connection allows organisations to receive and make real time payments throughout areas such as Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, at the same rates as bank or credit card transactions.

Designed to give customers a seamless mobile payments experience, Tola Mobile can now reconcile transactions that would previously have been delayed or even potentially lost when outages and downtime occur within the region’s Mobile Network Operators. Africa has seen a significant rise in the growth of its mobile money ecosystem. There are now 30 million mPesa subscribers in Kenya, processing at least 1.1 trillion Kenyan shillings ($10.6 billion) a quarter, a significant percentage of the country’s GDP.

Shane Leahy, CEO of Tola Mobile, comments, “The Mobile Payments infrastructure, provided by operators, is now as important to the country’s commerce, as Visa/MasterCard/AMEX processing is in the Western world. Being able to reconcile transactions is vital in the region, just as if the credit card network was suddenly unavailable for a few hours in the UK, it would have a dramatic impact on  business transactions. Merchants in Africa also need business resilience and business continuity in order to run and maintain their businesses.”

“The reality is that there are times when networks in the region face outages and downtime. This affects the ability of the systems to process mobile money lodgements and disbursements in a timely manner. During this downtime Tola.wallet enables merchants to continue operation, buffering the systems until they are operational again and ensuring that there is a full and complete reconciliation of mobile money transactions once Operator’s services are available again.” continued Leahy.

The advantages of Tola.wallet being able to reconcile lost transactions are numerous, not least of which for the gambling industry, as it ensures there is minimum delay for gamblers to receive payouts into their betting accounts despite unfortunate network outages and downtime.