Sending Money to a Wrong Till & Paybill Just Got Harder; Here's Why

It is a Tuesday afternoon, and Achieng is standing at the counter of her regular hardware shop in Nairobi, phone in hand. She has done this a hundred times: open the M-Pesa menu, select Lipa na M-Pesa, tap Pay Bill, punch in the numbers, confirm. She barely looks at the screen anymore. Her thumb knows the sequence better than her eyes do.

She enters Equity Bank's paybill number, 247247, followed by the shop's Till number. Normally, the next screen would simply ask her to confirm an amount. Today, a name appears first. It is not quite the name she was expecting for the shop, but close enough that she pauses to read it again. It matches. She taps Confirm, and the payment goes through as always, just a second slower than usual.

She barely registers it, but that half second of doubt is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

For as long as customers have been paying merchants through Till and paybill numbers, the system has relied on trust that was never actually verified. A customer types in a string of digits and hopes they got it right. One wrong number, one transposed digit, and the money can land in a stranger's account instead of the merchant's. No name is shown, no warning is given, and there is no second chance. The payment simply goes through, with recovery being quite a hectic process which can hamper budgets.

Equity Bank has been dealing with the consequences of exactly this problem. Misdirected payments caused by incorrect account or Till numbers generate a steady stream of complaints and reversal requests, each requiring manual work to resolve, and each leaving a customer a little less confident about paying the next time digitally. Merchants feel it too: a disputed payment on a customer's end usually means a delay or a headache on theirs.

Equity and M-Pesa have fixed the gap through Hakikisha: a name confirmation service that lets a customer verify who they are actually paying, whether that is a recipient, a merchant, or a business, before the payment is completed. 

It began as a Safaricom offering for M-Pesa transfers between individuals and was recently extended to cover Equity Bank's merchant and business payment channels, closing a gap that existed whenever a customer paid a business rather than a person. 

The same verification now applies whether a customer pays through M-Pesa or directly through Equity's own channels, so the check is consistent no matter how the payment begins.

The mechanics are straightforward, and they follow the exact path Achieng took at the hardware shop. 

Open the M-Pesa menu, select Lipa na M-Pesa, then Pay Bill. Enter Equity's paybill number, 247247. Enter the merchant's account or Till number as usual. Before the transaction is finalised, the registered name of that merchant appears on screen. The customer is asked to look at it properly and decide: confirm if it matches who they meant to pay, or cancel if it does not.

That second option matters as much as the first. If the name displayed is not the one a customer expected, the guidance is simple: cancel the transaction and verify the correct details directly with the merchant before trying again. No money moves, no dispute needs to be filed later, and there is no waiting on a reversal that may never arrive.

None of this adds meaningful friction to the process. The name lookup happens in real time, so the extra step costs a customer little more than the second Achieng spent confirming a name she almost did not need to check. Nor is it optional or occasional: every payment made to the 247247 paybill now runs through the same verification, whether the customer notices it or not.

What changes is not the process of paying. It is the moment right before the money leaves the account. It now runs on a name the customer can actually see and choose to trust or not.