BebaPay

» see bebapay.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

BebaPay was a Nairobi product at the only layer where anything got decided, which was the conductor's hand. Every layer above that worked. The card and the bank behind it were fine, and so was the phone that read it. None of that mattered, because the person taking your fare did not want the transaction to exist in a readable form.

Google launched it on 30 April 2013 with Equity Bank Kenya. You got a free prepaid card, loaded it at an agent, and on the bus you touched it against an Android handset the conductor held. The fare came off your balance and you got a receipt by SMS. Kenya was the obvious place to try this: M-Pesa had already made a whole country comfortable with money living on a phone.

Transit payment in Turkish cities got settled from the other direction. The municipality runs the buses, the municipality issues the card, and no driver has a vote in whether it is accepted. Nairobi's matatus are privately owned and each vehicle is somebody's own business, so a card had to win an argument with every crew on every route, one at a time, forever.

It never won that argument. Google announced on 16 February 2015 that the service was ending, and on 15 March the cards came off the streets. Equity Bank offered holders a prepaid MasterCard at no extra cost, told them to visit an agent with the old card before the deadline, and set up refunds for anyone who wanted their remaining balance back after 28 March.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the conductor's hand ~

The matatu conductor is not an employee of a transport authority. They are part of a crew running a vehicle that somebody owns and somebody else drives, working against a daily target and settling up in cash at the end of a shift. A tap that produces a bank record changes what can be done with the difference between what was collected and what gets handed over.

There is a tax version of this objection and a much more ordinary version, and both were operating. Cash is faster in a crowded vehicle and it does not need a charged phone or a network that reaches that stretch of road. BebaPay asked the person with the least incentive to adopt it to do the extra work of adopting it, which is a design fault and not a market condition.

~ the cash that stayed cash ~

The Kenyan government had announced that public service vehicles would go cashless, and that announcement is what made the category look investable. Then the deadline moved, and moved again, and the rule that was supposed to make a card compulsory never came into force. Every competitor in the same window had the same problem. Pepea and Tangaza Pesa PSV were building on top of the identical regulation, and it stayed on paper for all of them.

Google's real lesson here was not about Kenya. It was that a payment system is a social arrangement wearing a technology costume, and the technology part is the easy half. The company had already learned a version of this with Checkout and would learn it again with Wallet, which took years and a rebuild before anybody tapped a phone at a till without thinking about it.

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