This is one process which has had several people scratching their heads on the portal. It is the process which one uses to enable their application to carry out requests on the live API and begin processing client payments. For this process, you require at least the following two items already existing:
- Paybill Number
- This is the shortcode which you received after you registered to use M-Pesa services.
- Business Administrator/Business Manager
- These are admin users on your M-Pesa Organization portal who have the roles of either the Business Administrator or the Business Manager assigned to them. To confirm who this is, you can try to follow the steps below on the M-Pesa Org Portal:
- – Log into the Org portal using the shortcode which you shall use in the Go Live process using any available web operator. Note that you must have a client certificate installed on your machine for this to work, otherwise the connection is simply terminated due to the browser not being able to get a certificate to verify you with. The Org. Portal Certificate currently works on Chrome, Mozilla and IE. To apply for a certificate, send a blank email to m-pesacertpassword@safaricom.co.ke, you shall receive a temporary username, password and some more instructions after a while. The summary of the instructions is: go to this site using IE on Windows (unfortunately this site does not accept any other browser or anything else, its based on VB 🙁 ), enter the username and password provided via email, enter your details then submit. After that, join the cat and mouse game and wait for it to be processed 🙂
- – Check if you have the Browse Organization menu at the top of the screen. If not, you are not an admin, sorry. If you have it, click on it.
Browse Org Menu Item
- – Click on the Operators sub-menu on the bar that appears on the left of the screen
Operators Menu Item
- – A list will appear showing all the users on your portal, and their roles. From this list, check on the Role column and see if anyone has the Business Administrator/Manager role on them. You can also click on the Operation icon at their far right on the list to see their profile and the complete list of roles assignable to them. That user with the Business Administrator/Manager role is the required one for the Go Live process.
Roles List
- – Open the Business Administrator/Manager user’s details by clicking the Operation icon at the far right. Once there, click on the KYC tab and confirm that the following details are there:
- Identity Status is Active
- Preferred Contact Phone Number (starting with 2547XX)
- Notification Receiving MSISDN (starting with 2547XX)
- Notification Receiving E-Mail
- ID type and Number
Operator Details
These details will be used for verification during the Go Live journey.
If those details are not available or are not updated, click on the Edit icon on the right side of the panel to add/modify them, then save. After confirming the above details, you may start the process. On the first step of the Go Live process, you shall be required to download and fill in a form specifying how your tests went along. These cases consist of the possible scenarios which you shall encounter as you test your application. The test cases just need a simple Success or Fail response on the Actual Results tab. I doubt you will have a Fail on that file anyways 🙂
How to fill Test Cases form
Once downloaded and filled, go back to the same Page and upload the form via the Upload Test Results form, click on Upload, then after the form has been picked up, check the Terms and Conditions checkbox, then click on Next.
On the Verification section, you shall need to confirm your ownership of the paybill you are taking live. This will require you to enter your paybill and your contact details, receive a One Time Pin (OTP) on your registered Mobile Phone, then put that OTP on the portal to confirm your authenticity. On that page, you shall select Verification type as Short Code (only one supported for now), Organization Name as the name of the Organization as registered on M-Pesa, your Organization ShortCode, and the username of either the Business Administrator or Business Manager as filled in on the Org Portal (that’s why I had you confirm the details exist first). Without either of these, the process will fail as there will be no contact phone to send you the OTP or the email to send the production URLs.
Once you click on Submit, and M-Pesa confirms the details you put as correct, it will send an OTP to the Phone Number registered on the Org Portal under the User whose username was filled on the verification form. Once you get the OTP on your phone (you might need a few retries), you shall fill it on the next section, the OTP Confirmation section. From the docs, the OTP has an expiry timeout of 3 minutes, thus you need to be fast, or you can just click on Resend OTP. Once the OTP has been confirmed, you shall then be given the chance to select the APIs you are applying for (note the limitations mentioed in the API Apps section). After completing the section, there shall also be created automatically the production apps for your account. These apps need to be approved internally, then after approval, you shall have the production URLs sent to the email registered against the same user who applied for Verification in step 2 of the process. You will then have the new Consumer Keys and Consumer Secrets for your app ready for use in production. More on this process can be found on the official site. For password creation, you can follow the steps given in the B2C section above
See https://biltmap.com/mpesa-integration-b2c/
