MTN Targets 60m Mobile Money Subscribers In 4 Years across Africa

MTN, the biggest mobile network in Africa said it is targeting to increase its mobile money subscribers from the current 21 million to 60 million in the next three to four years across the continent.

Mr. Rob Shutter, chief executive officer, MTN Group who disclosed this at the Deloitte Africa in 2018 Outlook conference in South Africa last week. The company is encouraged by the progress made by its Mobile Money offering in other geographies that it operates in.

Shutter said “the core digital service that we have decided to put our money on is Mobile Money. 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.”

He pointed out that 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.”

MTN Mobile Money allows anyone with a mobile phone to send and receive money quickly, safely, affordably and conveniently. “We will be the largest bank in Africa, leveraging scale, network, brand, infrastructure and distribution,” Shutter noted.

He believes there is also potential for the adoption of digital services – Mobile Money, media, entertainment and social media. “When you look at the adoption of mobile Internet, we are talking 20 per cent to 30 per cent of these markets. These are markets with born-digital youthful populations – these are people who were introduced to the Internet on a mobile device.”

SOURCE:LEADERSHIP