The send-side cost from London is the same. What arrives in the wallet is the same. What she pays to withdraw cash at the agent is the same. The three features extend the places she can spend the money straight from the phone, which was already the one path with no agent fee.
What the three features actually are
The three sit inside the new M-PESA Super App (My OneApp), which rolled through 2026 and now carries all of this on one screen.
- Tap-to-Pay lets her hold her phone up to a card reader at the shop counter; the shop charges her through M-PESA and there is no PIN pad to key on. The reader is the same one that already took Visa and Mastercard. Safaricom switched this on first in the M-PESA Business App in August 2026 and extended it to shoppers in the Super App through the autumn.
- Scan-to-Pay lets her point her camera at a QR sticker on the counter, confirm the amount, and key her PIN. No shop number to type and no mistyped shilling.
- AI Pay lets her point her camera at a paper bill or a shop receipt. The app reads the long PayBill number and the account number for her and fills them in. She confirms the amount and keys her PIN. The AI is doing the typing, but the payment itself is still an ordinary PayBill payment.
All three sit in the same app and all three run on the same M-PESA payment paths your family was already using: Buy Goods for a shop, PayBill for a bill. The fee comes from the path, not from how she pays at the counter, so changing the gesture does not change what she is charged.
What the shopper actually pays at the counter
Nothing extra. M-PESA Buy Goods, which is the shop payment path, is free for the customer on every amount from one shilling up to the single-transaction ceiling of 250,000. The shop pays a small merchant fee above KSh 500 (0.55 percent, capped at KSh 200), and from 7 August 2026 that was cut again. The shopper's side was zero before the cut, and it is zero after. Tap-to-Pay and Scan-to-Pay change which gesture she makes at the counter. They do not change what she pays.
PayBill, the household-bill side, is where AI Pay helps. The fee depends on which setup the biller is on. Most of the big ones your family would recognise are on Customer Bouquet (also labelled Bila Malipo), which means the business pays and the customer pays nothing. Kenya Power, the big banks, most private schools, most hospitals and most large landlords are on it. For those, AI Pay saves her the typing and costs her nothing.
A smaller set of billers are on Business Bouquet, where the customer pays a small fee by ladder. The AI reads either kind of slip the same way. The slip tells you which one it is only after you have paid, by whether the receipt took a fee off or not.
Catch
"Customer Bouquet" means the business is paying. "Business Bouquet" means the customer is paying. The English is the opposite of what it sounds like, so it is worth reading twice. The 7 August 2026 fee cuts did not touch either side of the PayBill ladder.
What she pays at the agent, if she still withdraws
Also unchanged. The withdrawal ladder at an M-PESA agent runs from KSh 11 at the smallest band up to a flat cap of KSh 309 on anything from KSh 50,001 to the KSh 250,000 ceiling. On a £200 send, which arrives as roughly KSh 34,000, the band fee is around KSh 197, about £1.15. On a £300 send, which arrives as roughly KSh 51,800, she hits the top band, so KSh 309, about £1.80.
The agent cash-out is the one small fee the family has always paid on the money arriving from the UK, and the October 2026 launch did not touch it. Airtel Money matched M-PESA on this ladder in July 2026, so switching wallets does not help either.
She only pays the agent fee if she withdraws cash. For the portion of the money that gets spent in a shop, a matatu, a Kenya Power bill, a school fee, there is no agent fee because there is no agent. That path already existed. Tap-to-Pay, Scan-to-Pay and AI Pay make more of her spending fit it.
What really changed in October
One thing changed that is worth your attention: around 30,000 Pesapal card terminals, the small black readers you see on the counter of pharmacies, supermarkets, petrol stations and chain cafes, now accept M-PESA from a phone tap. Those shops had card readers for years. They did not have an M-PESA Buy Goods number painted on the wall. From the October 2026 rollout, they take the wallet.
That is the one change in the October rollout that could move money for a family on your line. For families whose spending tends to go to the chain pharmacy, the fuel station, the mid-size supermarket, more of it can now move off cash and off the agent fee. For families whose spending is mostly a mama mboga, a boda rider and the butcher at the end of the road, this change does not reach yet. Those are still a Pochi la Biashara number, cash, or a Buy Goods number painted on the wall.
AI Pay is useful for your mother in a smaller way. If she has been copying a 20-digit PayBill plus a 10-digit account number off a paper bill into a phone keypad, by lamplight, with reading glasses on, the AI reading it for her is a kindness. It does not save her money. It saves her a mistake.
The small Pochi catch to tell your family
The Pochi la Biashara path, the one small traders use when they do not have a formal Buy Goods number, had its customer-free tier doubled from KSh 100 to KSh 200 on 1 August 2026. That is a 90-day promotion. Unless Safaricom extends it, the old ladder returns on 1 November 2026, and small Pochi payments above KSh 100 will cost the customer a few shillings again. If a lot of her weekly spend is matatus and the market, note the date.
What this does not change for you in London
The fee to send from Wise, Sendwave, WorldRemit, Remitly or Revolut to a Kenyan M-PESA number is set on your side. Nothing in the Safaricom rollout reaches it. On £200 the total cost is still about £1 to £3, depending which of those apps you open, and the wallet still fills in seconds. The full breakdown by app sits in the cheapest way to send money to Kenya from the UK.
If you were about to open your bank app because the news made M-PESA sound suddenly different, none of this changes the quiet £7 Lloyds keeps in the exchange rate on a £200 send. The gap between the good apps and the bank is unchanged.
What to tell your family
- If she is at a shop with a Pesapal reader on the counter, she can tap the phone against it. She pays nothing extra, the shop takes the money through M-PESA, and there is no agent walk and no cash to count.
- If a shop has a QR sticker on the counter, she can scan it with the camera. Same thing, same price (nothing).
- If she is paying Kenya Power, a bank or a school from a paper bill, AI Pay can read the number for her. She still pays nothing because those billers are on Customer Bouquet. The gift is that she does not mistype the account.
- If she suspects a landlord or a utility is on Business Bouquet, AI Pay still works, but the small customer fee has not changed. A fee taken off the receipt tells her she was right.
- For a mama mboga, boda or matatu, the method is still Pochi la Biashara or cash. The free tier is KSh 200 until 31 October 2026; after that the old ladder returns unless Safaricom extends.
The money you sent arrives in the wallet the same way as before. For the portion she spends from the phone, there is no cash-out fee, and more shops will now take it that way. For the portion she still withdraws as cash, the agent fee is the same KSh 11 to KSh 309 it has always been.
Corrections
None so far. If we get something wrong, the fix is dated here.