M-Pesa

We have now moved from hard cash to mobile money.

Today, I can send money to Rwanda through the Kenyan mobile money system called M-Pesa.

The telcos have made it easy that once I send money in Kenyan currency, I'll send money to you, Jerry, in Rwanda, for example, and you want me to pay you, say, a thousand francs.

I'll calculate what that is in Kenyan shillings and send it.

So that if we can find it right on the digital side, then it would be easier for Jerry, who is in Nairobi, to be able to even have or share a currency with someone in Botswana, with someone in Ghana, with someone even in North Africa.

If we can find that system and tailor it towards the digital systems that are already strong in Africa.

Kantai is already mentioning M-Pesa.

You're already now even saying MTN is also moving towards the banking system.

So this is our digital sales onboarding tool.

So that means fully, you just need your ID, be present because we check liveliness, and then you go through the process and in five minutes you have an account and you're quickly able to fund it using M-Pesa.

And this is 85% of today, maybe 20, 25,000 accounts in a month.

So without that, really... bringing 25,000 forms into the branches for people to open accounts would have been impossible.

Secondly, we've said then, how do we keep these customers sticky? So it's one thing to open an account, but what are we offering these customers to even allow them to come to us? So we have the Nisare.

The Nisare was really an industry, it's audacious if we say that, because then saying we're not going to collect transaction fees for payments into M-Pesa and into Airtel money, A lot of people didn't understand how, but that's the why customers are opening accounts with INM because it makes sense.

And we are saying it's really a testament to financial inclusion because we know the pain of transaction costs.

And when the government had said stop charging during COVID, later we said, why then start charging? And really- This is how we are going to say to customers, what's unique about INM? So that has given our customers a reason to come to INM.

So one question I ask leaders to ask themselves is, what is in your hand? So by this I mean, what are the unique skills and resources that your company has, and how can you use those skills and resources to serve society if you thought a little bit more creatively? And why that's important is it makes sure that you focus your sustainability activities on the aspects that you have the biggest bang for buck, the largest impact, so it doesn't cost you as much in terms of financial returns, because you still need to make sure that you are, uh, financially sustainable.

So an example, Vodafone, they used to have a technology which was able to send text messages, and they redeployed this to M-PESA, a mobile money service which provided financial inclusion to hundreds of thousands of households, uh, in poor countries around the world.

Now, this approach of looking internally at what you're good at is actually quite different to the approach that many other companies take, which is to look externally at what is in the news, where can I get the most credit? So when George Floyd was murdered, many companies gave lots of money to, to Black Lives Matter.

Now I, as an ethnic minority, care a lot about racial justice, but if you are Vodafone, is your expertise really knowing that Black Lives Matter is a better charity than Doctors Without Borders or the Red Cross? No, instead what you should do is to focus on the activities that you have the greatest bang for buck.

Both have underlying actual bank dollar cash backing it.

So the, in MoMo, the issuer for, in Africa, the biggest players are M-PESA in Kenya, and in Ghana, West Africa, it's MTN, the biggest players.

And if you go to Francophone Africa, there's Orange Money.

But it's still the same player across board.