How a mobile money collection works, from the customer's tap to your balance

If you have only ever taken cash or bank transfers, mobile money collections can feel like a black box. A customer enters a number, their phone buzzes, and a few seconds later you have been paid. Knowing what happens in between makes it much easier to build a good checkout, answer customer questions and spot problems early.

1. You ask for a payment

Everything starts with a request: an amount, a currency and, usually, a reference of your own such as an invoice number. You can make that request from the dashboard, from a payment link, from a hosted checkout page or from the API. MariPay records it as an order and creates a payment attempt against it.

2. The customer is prompted

The customer picks their mobile money network and enters their number. The network sends a prompt to their phone asking them to approve the amount and enter their PIN. Until they act, the payment is pending. This is the step you do not control, and it is why a payment should never be treated as successful just because the request was accepted.

3. The network confirms

When the customer approves, the network tells our payment partner, and our partner tells MariPay. Only then does the payment move to completed. If the customer declines, has too little balance, or simply ignores the prompt until it times out, the payment ends as failed or expired instead.

• Pending: the prompt has been sent and we are waiting for the customer.
• Completed: the network confirmed the money moved.
• Failed: the customer declined, had insufficient funds, or the network rejected it.
• Expired: nobody approved the prompt in time.

4. Your balance is updated

On completion, MariPay writes entries to a double-entry ledger: the gross amount collected, our fee, and the net amount you keep. Because every movement is a ledger entry, you can always trace a balance back to the payments behind it. The collection fee is 5% of each successful payment, and a payment that fails or expires is never charged.

5. You find out

The result shows up in your dashboard straight away, and if you connected a webhook, MariPay sends your server a signed event such as payment.completed. That webhook, not the browser redirect, is what you should use to mark an order as paid.

6. Getting the money to your bank

Collected funds sit in your MariPay balance. When you want them in your bank account, add a settlement account in your settings and request a settlement. We set the amount aside immediately, our team makes the transfer, and you are emailed with the bank reference once it is paid.