Five pitfalls in Mobile Money integration (and how to avoid them)

Integrating Mobile Money looks simple in the sandbox. At scale, with real money and real users, it is anything but. Here are the failure modes we plan for from the first line of code.

1. Non-idempotent writes

Networks time out. Users retry. Without idempotency keys, you double-charge — and trust evaporates. Every money-moving call must be safely retryable.

2. Reconciliation as an afterthought

If you can't reconcile automatically, you'll do it manually forever. Build the reconciliation engine alongside the integration, not after.

In payments, the unhappy path is the product.

3. Treating providers as identical

Each provider has its own lifecycle, callback semantics and edge cases. A unified API is worth building, but only if it faithfully models each provider underneath.