Mobile Money Africa

Arnaud Chevalier – Director of New Domains and Technical Sales, Kabira

Q: Could you provide a brief overview of your organization and your role and responsibilities in it?

A: Kabira Technologies, has been providing software infrastructure solutions to communication service providers since 1998. During this time, Kabira has successfully implemented solutions for more than 100 customers in over 40 countries including AT&T, Orange, Hutchison 3G, Visa, and Hitachi.. Kabira has also built a significant footprint in Africa with implementations in more than 15 countries, from Morocco to Botswana and from Egypt to Senegal. This includes major operators like Orange affiliates, Maroc Telecom or Mobinil. Those customers run some of their most mission-critical applications on our solutions. Because of this, Kabira designs its solutions to deliver the highest levels of reliability and total customer. Our mobile payments solution, the Kabira Mobile Transaction Hub™ (KMTH) is built upon Kabira’s market-leading transaction processing platform and enables operators to create innovative and differentiated mobile payment services.
KMTH is an open and flexible mobile transaction processing platform that allows mobile network operators, service providers and financial institutions to deliver, mobile airtime and money services, from airtime recharges up to remittances services or utilities bill payments – nationwide or between different countries.
As Director of New Domains and Technical Sales for Kabira, it is my responsibility to for driving strategic discussions with leading prospects and customers to anticipate the future of the Telecommunications industry’s products and services, and for turning these into new product offerings for Kabira.

Q: Your company is currently providing services for several countries in Africa and has been an active participant in our telecommunications market. What trends do you believe will be growing in the coming year?

This is a timely question right now. Kabira recently exhibited at AfricaCom 2009 and we heard directly from many people that broadband is projected to take off in 2010, particularly with fiber deployments in major urban areas. We heard that this will be one of the biggest growth drivers for operators in this region. Also, WiMAX will grow, both for mobility’s sake as well as an alternative for broadband coverage.
Those trends are paving the way for launching aggressive mobile web offerings. A heavy prepaid context is going to be a key factor that operators must consider when they design their lower-end packages of targeted service offerings: implementing smart policy and charging adapted to your market will help to drive consumer adoption of mobile data services in the very near future – an area where Kabira can bring also immediate value for African operators.

Q: And did you hear of any significant trends dealing specifically with mobile money in Africa?

Of course! Mobile Money is – again – the hottest topic for the African telecom market with a lot of discussion around M-PESA. This is true not only for countries like Kenya, but also for even bigger countries like Tanzania. And, although it took more time in Tanzania than it did in Kenya to get started, mobile money applications are now really beginning to take off. Of course, understanding how the potential success for different services varies given local contexts, is clearly “a requirement” for implementing service packages and operators must understand that a number of key factors go into determining this potential for success. Specifically, factors such as the policy for agents to manage their fleet of mobile resellers and the effects of local regulatory impacts to drive registration for those particular services are issues that must be addressed.
Last, but by far not least, we feel that cross-border remittance will not only be an important application for inclusion in the mobile money service suite, it is a “must-have.” We have heard from several sources that rather than supporting numerous varied financial services, the key to having a successful mobile money business is in having a large set of corridors and touch-points available to support migrants in developing countries.

Q: Can you touch on what all these trends mean to your company, Kabira Technologies?

This is very exciting for us because the trends we heard about at AfricaCom validate both Kabira’s product approach and the partnerships we are building to support this region. We are very much looking forward to actively participate in all these initiatives in Africa throughout next year and beyond.

Q: We have heard that interest in your technology is growing very rapidly right now because it has demonstrated that it can play an extremely important role in helping operators in Africa. Can you describe how your technology would do this?

What Kabira’s mobile payments solutions do is enable a pragmatic and agile approach for operators to address the emerging and fast-evolving mobile payments market. Operators who implement Kabira solutions are able to rely on a highly available mobile payments platform that is proven to scale to extremely large volumes of mission-critical transactions on standard commodity hardware. Having such a platform allows these operators to anticipate future growth, and be assured they can successfully support that growth – flexibly and cost-efficiently. By adopting a leading-edge infrastructure platform approach with Kabira, operators could be able to grow their business through such activities as:
• Supporting an aggressive agents’ recruitment plan because they are now able to employ a feature-rich and flexible commissioning configuration. This allows them to attract and manage new agents much more efficiently.
• Facilitating user adoption with configurable promotions patterns and local adaptation to preferred channels (SMS, USSD, STK …)
• Ensuring compliance to specific regulations
More than simply a set of solutions addressing key functional and operational aspects of mobile money, KMTH is also a framework that enables our customers to innovate and support an aggressive services roadmap.
And, with Kabira, they can do all of this in a manner that limits their delivery risks since their solution is built on a platform and with an organization with a very long track-record of secure, successful, highly available and reliable deployments for over 10 years, supporting some of the largest operators in the world.

Q: Can you share an example of how you have implemented this for an operator in Africa?

Let me describe what we are doing for an operator with presence across multiple countries in Africa. The main objective of our customer was to acquire one unique payment gateway platform, able to handle all types of payment transactions such as airtime purchase, e-money transfers, or international money remittance. A major, primary focus was on initial use cases with a proven return on investment so as to justify the investment in this new software infrastructure. Obviously, key characteristics for this software platform were reliability, scalability, flexibility and the ability to evolve easily.
With Kabira’s long history of expertise and experience in both the telecommunications and payments markets, we were able to propose a platform solution with the strict levels of security and reliability required for mobile payments transactions. Additionally, the Kabira solution enabled our customer to have an iterative approach for the deployment of their payment services ? leveraging each project phase, always building the services portfolio at an increasing pace. On top of that, we could show that we would be deploying platforms for this operator which have been “field-proven” across multiple geographies, and supporting huge subscriber-bases. This assured the operator that the Kabira solution could easily handle the levels of traffic produced by Africa’s most densely populated countries.
By working with this operator to take an infrastructure-based solution, the operator understood that it would be able to obtain the speed and reliability they need for their mobile payments / mobile money transactions, while at the same time increasing their potential to improve their margin.

Q: And with regards to remittances, what is Kabira’s vision?

International Money Transfers represent a huge potential for African operators – and they know it. Our belief is that for capturing a significant market share and value out of the remittance flows, Operators will need to propose as fast as possible a simple and immediate access, not to one, not to three but to tens of countries, from neighborhood to developed countries. Interoperability, interconnectivity and settlement facilities are key features to bring to Operators, and that is why Kabira is focusing its efforts in this domain to build the true hub that will bring that promise to the market.

Q: Thank you for this wonderful information for our readers. Can you tell us how to get in touch with someone at Kabira if they want to know more?

Certainly. To find out more about Kabira and our mobile money solutions, you can visit our website at www.kabira.com. To learn more about what we can do for telecommunications service providers in Africa, please send an email message to info@kabira.com with your contact information and our Africa sales team will get back in touch with you.

Thank you.

“Arnaud Chevalier is Director of New Domains and Technical Sales is one of Kabira’s leading experts on service delivery systems for wireless and wireline broadband networks. Arnaud joined Kabira in 2000 and has been instrumental in helping Kabira’s team win critical projects in the service aware, fulfillment and mobile payments domains with major Telco operators. Arnaud’s engineering background brings him a wealth of telecommunications experience. He holds a Physicist Engineer Diploma from Ecole Supérieure de Physique & Chimie Industrielles in Paris, France, as well as a DEA graduate from Telecom ParisTech (ENST), France.”