Bad Request - Invalid Initiator InformationDaraja API error

M-Pesa error Bad Request - Invalid Initiator Information: Invalid initiator information

This is a Daraja API error — Safaricom rejects the request itself, before any customer prompt, usually over authentication or payload validation.

What causes it

For secured APIs (B2C, Reversal, Transaction Status, Account Balance), the initiator username or the RSA-encrypted SecurityCredential is wrong, does not belong to the shortcode, or has expired.

How to fix it

Re-encrypt the initiator password with Safaricom's current RSA public certificate, confirm the initiator name belongs to the shortcode, and re-save it in Credentials.

How paylod handles this

paylod manages Daraja OAuth tokens, request signing, and payload formatting for you — the whole class of authentication and malformed-request errors is handled by the wrapper, so you send one clean REST call and get a typed response.

See the paylod M-Pesa API

Related M-Pesa error codes

Sources