M-PESA Jumbe and the end of the payment screenshot.

In October 2026 Safaricom introduced M-PESA Jumbe, a privacy feature that replaces a customer's full name and phone number with a short alias called a JumbeID, made up of initials and the last two digits of their number (The Online Kenyan). Safaricom's reason is one every shop owner will recognise: customers are often asked to show their M-PESA message as proof of payment, and that exposes personal details to whoever looks.

What changes for merchants

The same announcement lets Lipa na M-PESA and Pochi la Biashara merchants nominate up to 50 additional people to receive payment notifications. That means a cashier, a delivery rider or a branch manager can see that a payment arrived without asking the customer to prove it.

Why the screenshot habit has to go

Verifying payment by looking at a customer's phone, or by a forwarded screenshot, has three problems:

• It is easy to fake. Edited screenshots are a known fraud.
• It exposes personal data. Names and numbers end up in staff WhatsApp chats and galleries.
• It does not scale. Someone has to match screenshots to orders by hand.

Kenya's Data Protection Act also expects businesses to collect only the personal data they need. A gallery full of customers' payment messages is hard to defend.

What to do instead

1. Use the notifications Safaricom now provides for staff who need to confirm payments in person.
2. For online orders, confirm payments in your system. An STK Push integration tells your website the payment succeeded and marks the order paid, with no screenshot involved.
3. Reconcile against the statement, not the customer's phone. Your system should match each payment to an order reference automatically.
4. Clean up old screenshots on staff phones and shared chats.

The direction of travel

Between Jumbe, Scan-to-Pay and the growth of API payments, M-PESA is moving towards payments that verify themselves. Businesses that build on that, rather than on photos of phones, will be faster at the counter and safer with customer data.

We build M-PESA confirmation into websites and business systems so payments are matched to orders automatically. Ask us how.