Supermarket chain Naivas has revealed that 39% of its customer transactions are now cashless. The leading Kenyan grocery retailer, currently having a growth spurt, now operates 1,320 Visa credit card (PDQ) machines across its 58 outlets and has been named as Visa’s Kenyan merchant of the year.
Naivas has committed to pushing a greater shift to cashless transactions – which also help cut employee fraud too. In October 2017, Naivas launched its new payment system for all retail stores, called Naivas Pay. Using integrator Interswitch, it enabled Naivas to accept chip and pin for debit and credit payments, as well as an SIM toolkit push for Mpesa payments via API that required a shopper to input their phone number on the PDQ machine.
Naivas is currently on an expansion drive, having opened a new store in Mombasa in October and a further store in Embu in late November. In 2019 overall the company will have added nine new outlets to bring it up to 58 outlets overall.
It is currently preparing new stores in Ruiru and Nairobi’s Hurlingham suburb, both of which are set to open before the end of the year. The Ruiru outlet occupies a new three-floor commercial complex on Nairobi’s Eastern Bypass while the Hurlingham outlet will be near the Yaya Centre, and compete directly with Chandarana’s two outlets in the Hurlingham area.
