Aside failures in SA, MTN still working to rule Africa in Mobile Money Service
Considering the intimidating forces of Financial Technology (FinTech) in growing seamless access to financial services using mobile money platforms, MTN, Africa’s most consolidated mobile operator, has started dreaming of floating what can be seen as Africa’s most innovative bank and financial services empire.
This formed part of key presentation by Rob Shuter MTN CEO during the Deloitte Africa in 2018 Outlook conference in Woodmead.
This stemmed from an ongoing plan to build Mobile Money into a 60 million customer business in the next three to four years.
In line with this dream, MTN said “We will be the largest bank in Africa, leveraging scale, network, brand, infrastructure and distribution”.
MTN said apart from lack of commercial viability and operational failures recorded in driving Mobile Money in South Africa, green lights so far received from other economies in Africa are enough to deepen the plan for an Africa-wide Mobile Money Bank.
Throughout Africa today, MTN Mobile Money allows anyone with a mobile phone to send and receive money quickly, safely, affordably and conveniently.
According to Shuter, “The core digital service that we have decided to put our money on is Mobile Money.”
Continuing, the MTN big boss averred that “Mobile Money is really about leveraging the strength of the brand and leveraging the strength of the distribution because we have built a huge informal distribution network for prepaid airtime to bring customers into a transactional banking system.”
“MTN has deployed Mobile Money across 14 markets and “if we look at our 30-day active users, which is the most important matric, we are growing by half a million customers a month. I think that’s pretty cool and today we are sitting at 21 million subscribers.
“We are a new age transactional banking provider and it’s a very big imperative for us, and the key thing we want to do is to scale it rapidly.”
