An M-Pesa agent in Westlands opens two accounts every morning before the shop unlocks. One is the transaction log. One is the float account.
Most people who build products for agents have seen only the first one.
The Safaricom rate card for M-Pesa agents is a public document. It shows what an agent earns per transaction tier. The range runs from KES 4 on a small deposit to KES 200 on a large withdrawal. Agents know these numbers. Founders building products for agents quote these numbers.
The rate card stops there.
M-Pesa agents hold float - typically KES 200,000 to KES 1,000,000 or more in combined cash and e-money. That float does not sit idle.
Kenyan money market funds - including Safaricom's own Ziidi product - returned an average of 14.24 percent per annum in June 2024. An agent managing KES 500,000 in working float earns roughly KES 5,800 per month in interest. That figure does not appear on any Safaricom document.
For a super agent managing several million KES across a retail network, the interest income is material. Co-operative Bank, Diamond Trust Bank, and other Kenyan banks are formal float partners in the M-Pesa super-agent structure. The mechanism exists. The rate is published. The business is running.
The World Bank case study on Kenyan M-Pesa agents documents this directly. One retail agent category - processing standard volumes at standard commissions - loses money on commissions alone. Their costs of maintaining float and staffing exceed what the rate card pays. Those agents stay in business because the rate card is not the whole business.
The commission framing is useful for regulators. It is not useful for product design.
A product that helps agents earn more per transaction addresses the income line every agent already tracks. A product that helps agents manage float allocation - timing, amount, rate - addresses the income line most agents still handle manually. No product currently serves this well at scale.
The agent behind the counter is not running a payments booth with a margin problem.
She is running a treasury operation with a commission on the side.
Products that start from the commission miss the business.
