Payment methods in Tanzania

The market

Tanzania pays by phone. M-Pesa arrived in 2008 and became the everyday way to keep and send money, including online: the checkout shows the merchant number or pushes a prompt to the phone, the payer confirms with a PIN, the provider is credited instantly and there is no chargeback. Other mobile wallets share the market, but M-Pesa is the one in the catalogue. Visa and Mastercard cover the banked part of the market, tourism and foreign shoppers, and settle at T+1 through the acquirer. The Bank of Tanzania licenses payment system providers and electronic money issuers under the National Payment Systems Act of 2015; the licensed provider is the party in the payment chain.

How Tranzify clients launch

Tanzania is in the catalogue on request: a client asks for the Tanzanian integration and enables Flutterwave under its own contracts and licence; Flutterwave covers M-Pesa, Visa and Mastercard, with payouts, and M-Pesa is enabled on a client’s request. The checkout shows M-Pesa first and a card form second; routing by method picks the route, and a card decline cascades to M-Pesa on the same page. A second acquirer for cards is added on request and shares volume by BIN. Every payment is journaled for five years, and the client’s system receives the final status by webhook.

M-Pesa

An M-Pesa payment is confirmed on the phone, so the orchestration keeps the order open until the provider reports the confirmation and then calls the webhook. Payouts to a Tanzanian phone number run through Flutterwave in seconds; refunds are not part of the M-Pesa flow in the catalogue, and the provider handles a refund as a payout.