Vodafone’s m-Pesa wallet will now allow customers to pay for Mumbai local bus rides. Users can pay for both daily bus tickets and for monthly bus passes. For this, Vodafone has partnered with public transportation aggregator Ridlr. Note that Vodafone does not have any direct tie up with the Mumbai transportation department, instead the telco is making use of Ridlr’s already existing deal with the Mumbai state transportation departments. The m-Pesa wallet app can only be used for rides on Brihanmumbai Electric Supply & Transport Undertaking (BEST) buses. Vodafone claims to have 26 lakh m-Pesa users in Mumbai alone with over 5000 offline cash-in points. Vodafone users can also use their feature phones to pay for rides via the USSD short-code *400#. On a pan-India basis, m-Pesa claims to have 16.4 million users, with over 140,000 offline cash-in points. Vodafone, however, doesn’t mention whether these are 16.4 million app downloads, or registered users, or active users. Apart from bus rides, M-Pesa has tied up with UP government for allowing citizens to pay electricity bills online. It also has a partnership with Government of Madhya Pradesh to facilitate mobile-based distribution of financial aid under various rural schemes. In April this month, M-Pesa also tied up with various non-banking finance companies for allowing customers to pay their monthly EMIs. Vodafone app users forced to download M-Pesa My Vodafone app, which allows subscribers to manage their bills, recharges and usage, was forcing customers to create an m-Pesa wallet in a January app update. Before the update, Vodafone…
