Safaricom PLC

A market is a place where people with different opinions meet, and they trade.

Meaning when I'm buying Safaricom from you, I'm, uh, I'm thinking, "This guy must be an idiot to sell the Safaricom to me at this price." And me, I'm thinking, "You must be an idiot to, [chuckles] to buy Safaricom from me." That's the, that's the insight with, uh, with investment.

And because this is not about me, this is about you guys, um, I want you guys to really understand that you are our target market.

It's a blessing and a curse to be middle c- to be called middle class [chuckles] because all products are designed to targeted at? At you.

True.

Because when you come from being a successful agency handling big clients, from the EABL, Safaricom-

Mm

... big clients, and getting big retainers, it took us a moment to say, "You know what? Yes."

So there's a lot of things we're saying, can we digitally enable our customers to move them from the branches into the digital channel? And really our frontline team being central to that, because even when you walk into the branch, we are relying on them to educate our customers and say, did you know that this is actually available on your app or on your channels and you don't have to come here? Another thing we did is with the expansion that we have of our branches going into the different counties, the different counties out there, these areas where apps are not the first thing you use.

I mean, even Safaricom today are still trying to move people into the M-Pesa, using one app for M-Pesa, but many people still use USSD.

So we've done a lot of work on just getting back our USSD channel capabilities.

Yeah.

In Tanzania, we had begun to do this sometime back in 2021, working with Affintech.

So again, working with Affintech has been something we've been doing for a while.

Since 2021, to offer what we call Kamilisha there, which is similar to Fuliza with Safaricom here in Kenya that NCBA has done.

So we are offering Kamilisha in Tanzania in partnership with Airtel.

I'm passionate about how technology has change, is changing and has changed my people here in Kenya and beyond, and Africa as a whole.

So I started my journey in the call center at Safaricom.

So my fintech journey actually started at Safaricom.

So I worked at Safaricom customer care for, since, uh, 2002 for four years.

Then I transitioned to volunteer at M-PESA.

That was two, three for them.

So that is the base that has helped me scale the new world of mobile payments, mobile savings, mobile insurance, and all...

Where we are now, the future, where we are talking about virtual assets like Bitcoins, cryptos, and all.

That's what they call it.

It was this collaboration between Vodafone and Safaricom, and they essentially allowed people to transfer money via a simple SMS.

And the scale of adoption was just staggering.

The text notes that by twenty nineteen, M-PESA had sparked twelve billion annual transactions across seven different countries.

In fact, you know, a couple of years back, I remember there used to be this war where Microsoft came, they launched their, you know, Africa Development Center.

Then they went and, you know, pushed all the developers from Safaricom.

So there was this war, you know, of talent because there's so much talent that our nation are tapping into.

I was reading your interview with ITW Africa, and you mentioned that Africa isn't a peripheral market for WSO2.