Naivas Supermarkets has set midnight of Sunday, September 29th as the deadline for accepting old Ksh 1,000 notes.
In a notice circulated to all its branches countrywide, the firm explained that it was taking caution in order to provide sufficient time to offload the stock of notes in its possession to its various banking partners.
In order to cater for an expected influx of old notes as Kenyans are wont to comply in the last minute, the retailer has set the early deadline ahead of the Central Bank of Kenya’s by one day.
Willy Kimani, Naivas Chief Commercial Officer noted that the retailer is strong supporter of the government’s move to introduce the new currency notes and coins.
He said that the retailer has observed a high conversion rate with the stock of new Ksh 1,000 notes standing 92%. At the same time, Naivas had noted a marked rise in card and mobile transactions.
“Over the last four months, we have seen a larger number of customers using new Ksh 1,000 notes even as a rising percentage of shoppers prefer to make cashless transactions totaling to about 37% of all payments. Cash payments form the balance, showing there is a strong trend towards mobile money and card payments, especially in Nairobi”, said Kimani, adding that the use of cash for paying bills had fallen by nearly one third over the last six months.
He added that the firm had installed cash tills and money counters that can read the new notes as well as detect those that are fake. Kimani pointed out that the firm is a great believer in promoting cashless transactions and has established a wide variety of partners with whom it actively promotes the use of both card and mobile money transactions.
These, he stated, are supported by a new state of the art processing system that the firm invested in to ensure the transactions are real time, safe and accurate.
“We decided to set up ours to be linked to all the payment systems through dedicated service lines that supports instant, secure and accurate transactions after research showed that customers wanted to spend the shortest time possible at the till, and a rising number of them prefer to use either card or mobile money to settle their bills,” he noted.
Several entities including Safaricom and Pizza Inn have also set earlier deadlines for accepting the old currency notes, which are set to be demonitised on October 1. The two announced they will not accept the old Ksh 1,000 notes effective Thursday, September 26th.
Public Service Vehicles (PSV) operators have also stopped taking the old notes. Apart from the Ksh 1,000 notes, the other denominations, however, remain unaffected.
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