African mobile money providers are shifting their focus from expanding access to increasing the depth of customer usage, as executives at the MTN Group Fintech Annual Summit in Johannesburg warned that high adoption figures can hide low uptake of savings and investment products.
Speaking on the second day of the summit on September 2, Shaibu Haruna, chief executive of Mobile Money Limited Ghana, challenged the perception that Ghana’s mobile money market has reached maturity simply because usage levels are high.
Haruna said the platform processes more than 26 million transactions every day, but only a small proportion of customers actively save on a 30-day basis, while less than 0.3 per cent of its user base actively invests.
“I get very uncomfortable when you describe Ghana as a matured market,” Haruna said. He explained that the industry’s next major opportunity lies in helping existing customers make fuller use of available financial services rather than focusing solely on acquiring new users.
In Zambia, however, executives said the challenge is less about expanding the range of products and more about ensuring consistent service delivery across a widely dispersed population.
Komba Malukutila, chief executive of Mobile Money Zambia, said simply increasing the number of agents was not enough to address customers’ access challenges.
“The customer doesn’t care how many agents you have,” Malukutila said. “They care about whether the service is accessible, and whether they’re able to access that liquidity.”
To address the issue, MoMo Zambia has deployed artificial intelligence tools to monitor agent activity and liquidity levels across its network. The technology enables the company to identify locations where customers are experiencing difficulties accessing cash or completing transactions.
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