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Digital payments
MOBILE FINANCIAL SERVICES
The unstoppable growth of digital finance Photo: Adobe Stock
Twenty years ago banking was out of reach for many Africans. Not anymore. Branchless banking and cashless payment are booming across the continent – and mobile phones are undoubtedly a major reason for that boom. Vaughan O’Grady looks at the unstoppable growth of digital financial services across the African continent.
Mobile money has now arrived in Djibouti.
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ASHLESS PAYMENTS HAVE certainly come a long way since the mobile phone-based systems that emerged in Kenya in the early 2000s. In fact the past 18 months has seen extraordinary activity in digital payments in Africa. A round-up of recent news relating to mobile money makes this clear. For example, in September this year Orange Middle East and Africa announced that it had selected Ericsson as a strategic partner for its pan-African Orange Money service, tapping Ericsson’s Wallet Platform to accelerate financial inclusion for its customers across 14 African countries. Another pan-African deal involved Standard Chartered Bank, which in August joined forces with operator Airtel Africa. Under the deal, Airtel Money’s customers will be able to make realtime online deposits and withdrawals from Standard Chartered bank accounts, receive international money transfers directly to their wallets, and access savings products. Banks are clearly no longer letting phone-
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only systems make the running. For instance, the Ecobank Group and Semoa, a fintech based in Lomé, are enabling mobile money users in Togo to carry out banking faster and easier, across the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) through a new digital banking service via Whatsapp called ‘Express cash by Semoa’.
“We witnessed a dramatic shift during the Covid-19 pandemic as consumers pivoted towards digital payments” The Ecobank Group, whose network covers 35 countries across Africa, is the first bank to integrate this type of service at its ATMs and Express Point Agency locations. Customers simply send a Whatsapp message – which means the service is available 24/7 – to
Semoa’s bot (a software program that performs automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks), called Dédé to request tokens for withdrawals, payment of bills or money transfer to friends and relatives in Togo and across the WAEMU region. Among operators a very new entrant is Telebirr, launched on 11 May 2021, a mobile money service developed by Huawei that is owned and launched by Ethio Telecom. It has already attracted millions of customers – not surprisingly given Ethio Telecom’s dominant position as the only telecommunication and internet service provider in Ethiopia. However, new licensees are on the way and the Ethiopian authorities are planning to allow the new licence offered to a Safaricom-led consortium in May to be upgraded to include mobile financial services. The other new market entrant – as yet not chosen – will be given the same privileges. Mobile money has also reached the much smaller market of Djibouti, where Djibouti Telecom’s D-Money allows users to carry out
Communications Africa Issue 5 2021
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