Add fraud-proof checks to any app fast. KODA's mobile money verification API creates an intent, verifies a reference, and fires a webhook — no telco deal.
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If you are building a checkout, a marketplace, or any app that takes mobile money, you already know the hard part is not accepting the payment — it is proving the payment actually happened. The operators make their own confirmation APIs slow, expensive, or simply unavailable to small businesses. KODA gives you the verification layer they make so difficult to obtain, exposed as a clean mobile money verification API you can integrate in a single afternoon.
The surface area is deliberately small. There are three core endpoints: create a payment intent, verify a customer's reference against the operator confirmation, and read your usage. Around them sits a sandbox with magic test codes, so you can build and test the entire flow without a single franc changing hands. Full request and response details live on the KODA API for developers page, but the shape is simple enough to hold in your head.
A typical flow looks like this. Your server creates an intent for, say, 25,000 CDF and shows the customer where to pay. The customer sends the money through their operator and submits the reference code they received. Your server calls verify with that code, and KODA matches it against the operator's own confirmation SMS sitting on the merchant's phone. In about three seconds you get back a definitive verdict — confirmed or not.
The single most important point about this API is what it does not require. There is no telco integration, no operator contract, and no partnership approval to wait on. KODA verifies against the confirmation SMS rather than a carrier endpoint, which is why you can skip the entire painful process described in How to Verify an M-Pesa Payment Without a Telco API. You get operator-grade certainty without ever touching an operator's paperwork.
Security is built into the verify step, not bolted on afterward. Once a reference is confirmed, KODA locks it forever. That single-use replay protection is what stops a customer from reusing one valid confirmation across several orders, and it is the backbone of the defence against How to Stop Mobile Money Screenshot Fraud in 2026. Anti-forgery, fraud scoring, and velocity rules run on every call, so a burst of suspicious verifications gets flagged automatically.
You should never poll KODA in a loop waiting for a payment to clear. Instead, register a webhook and KODA pushes a signed event the moment a reference verifies — from any door, not just the API. That real-time pattern is covered in Get a Webhook the Moment a Payment Is Verified, and it is what lets an order confirm and ship itself without a human refreshing a dashboard.
If you would rather not build the front end at all, there is a drop-in option. The hosted Checkout gives you a ready-made payment page that talks to the same engine, so you can add verified mobile money to a site with almost no code — walked through in Add a Verified Mobile Money Checkout to Any Website. Many teams start with Checkout to launch fast, then move to the raw API as their needs grow.
A common integration mistake is treating the reference code as trusted the instant the customer types it, or storing it without enforcing single use in your own database. With KODA you do not carry that burden — the lock lives in the engine, so even if the same code is submitted from two devices at once, only one order can ever claim it. Let the platform own uniqueness rather than reinventing it in your schema.
The API is simply one of the Five Ways to Accept & Verify Mobile Money (One Engine), sharing its engine with the Console, WhatsApp, USSD, and inbound SMS. That means a payment your API verifies and a payment a cashier checks by hand land in the exact same locked ledger, with the same fraud checks applied. Everything you need — endpoints, webhook signing, and sandbox keys — is documented on the KODA API for developers page.
Start small and grow into it. Many teams ship their first version using only create-intent and verify, prove the flow works against the sandbox magic codes, then layer in webhooks and usage reporting once real orders are flowing. Because there is no operator contract gating any of it, you are never blocked waiting on a third party to approve your launch. Get started with KODA free and grab a test key to build against today.
It creates a payment intent, verifies a customer’s reference code against the operator SMS, and notifies your server via webhook. Full reference at KODA API for developers.
No — that is the point. KODA verifies against the confirmation SMS, so you skip the How to Verify an M-Pesa Payment Without a Telco API telco process entirely.