The Kenya Commercial bank on Wednesday resumed mobile money lending through M-Pesa after a six-day break.
According to the lender, the break was due to a technical hitch that was caused by too many applications.
KCB CEO Joshua Oigara stated that the surge in application came after the lender announced that the interest rates on mobile loans would be subjected to a cap of 14 per cent as per the new law on interest rates.
“Last week we had announced a new rate for our mobile lending platform, and that resulted in a huge demand from customers. Therefore we had to put the system down for the lending function in order to enhance its capacity, although other services such as payment of bills, payment of loans and salary advance were going on,” said Oigara.
The platform only supports 300 transactions per second but following the announcement, the number increased.
“We saw the highest amount of loan requests in our one and a half years at Sh120 million on Thursday, while we normally would disburse Sh50 million a day,” added Oigara.