Mobile operator MTN is targeting to build Africa’s largest digital fintech platform, with customers interactingmainly through an app, says MTN Group Fintech CEO Serigne Dioum.
Dioum made the comments yesterday at the second annual MTN Group Fintech Summit in Johannesburg, where Africa’s regulators, policymakers, financial institutions, technology partners, merchants, developers and innovators were brought together.
The three-day summit looks to emphasise the importance of collaboration between fintech, regulators and policymakers.
According to Dioum, the mobile telephony group is committed to driving Africa’s digital future by focusing on partnerships and delivering “impactful” services.
He listed digital infrastructure, interoperability, QR payments, cloud services, data and artificial intelligence, open finance, smartphones, stablecoins and central bank digital currencies as the forces that are setting the economics of digital financial services.
“Our mission is to create seamless digital and financial solutions that empower individuals and businesses to thrive, while working with partners to build Africa’s digital future. We want to help everyone to unlock growth and opportunity on the continent.”
MTN Group Fintech is the financial technology division of mobile telephony group MTN.
MoMo is its mobile money service, with users across 14 African markets, including South Africa. It saw 30 million transactions, and $330 billion processed in the first half of the year.
Data insights indicate that two-thirds (66%) of global mobile money transaction value is recorded to have flowed through Sub-Saharan Africa.
To achieve Africa’s digital future objective, Dioum explained that the strategy is around one connected Africa story and an enabling, partner-focused regulatory environment.
“We think these outcomes will be delivered through significant technology shift, together with targeted partnerships, and acquisition where needed, leveraging our bank tech lending platform, and discipline, risk and regulatory management, growing each of our business verticals and executing into focus stage. We want to unify the fintech organisation with a balanced financing strategy.
“We want to continue reinforcing our position as the leading digital financial service platform in the continent, and we want to digitally-enable every one of our customers.”
He elaborated that MTN’s model is still evolving, from access to intelligence. “We started with clear and simple process, moving money from one to another to payment, creating a merchant ecosystem, and also being a platform as we are today, getting all our partners to integrate with us using our open API platform, and we want to move to the intelligent state of where we are heading to.
“We want to be in the circle of reaching customers that use our platforms and our services, but with trust. Regulation will be decisive for us in enabling this transition.”
He stressed that the industry must engage with regulators early enough, and work together to build the future of financial inclusion platform in Africa.
Dioum commented that mobile money has become a selling point where customers are transacting, paying merchants, getting loans, saving money and insuring their assets.
“We’ve reached a scale and a space where we need to evolve by getting more flexibility and to be more armed to go deeper into transforming access.
“We want to build trust with our customers, and we want all Africans to have their dignity by becoming financially independent,” he said.
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