IN ASSOCIATION WITH: DIGITAL REPORT 2022 Creating a place for Vodafone in the world of FinTech IN ASSOCIATION WITH :
Creating a place for Vodafone in the world of FinTech 2 vodafone.com
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The way we pay for financial services products is changing with emerging technology, and Vodafone’s ambition is to be at the forefront of this change P roviding new and exciting ways to pay for goods, the FinTech industry is booming and the world of financial services is going through some fundamental –yet essential – changes. With a long history of working with different businesses in sectors of the financial industry, Vodafone has a focus on ensuring that its customers succeed in the future. Known for its telecommunications and consumer services, Vodafone is accelerating its journey within the FinTech sector to support those who need it most. Driving forward this journey is Varun Krishnan, Vodafone’s Managing Director for FinTech.
“Most people know Vodafone to be a leading global technology and telecommunications company. We have a huge footprint in Europe and also in Africa. Our purpose is to use technology to improve our customers' lives and enable a truly inclusive, sustainable digital society,” says“PeopleKrishnan.may know that we are a large mobile and fixed-line operator across our European and African footprint. We serve over 300 million mobile customers and over 28 million fixed customers. One of the things that surprises people is when I tell them we are one of Europe's largest TV platforms –that's always news to customers and people that I speak to.”
As a technology leader, Vodafone has been looking into new and disruptive technologies to ensure the company is best vodafone.com
“We rely partnershipson to deliver great value to our customers, as well as a great experience that's enabled by cuttingedge technology”
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Varun Krishnan is a seasoned technology leader with c. 20 years of experience in Telco, FMCG and Management Consulting across B2C and B2B businesses. He is currently the Managing director for Fintech at Vodafone Group Services and is based in Vodafone’s global headquarters in London, UK. Prior to being appointed into his current role, Varun was the global marketing director where he was responsible to deliver the commercial strategy and scale core mobile and fixed line propositions across Vodafone’s global footprint.
“Culture is everything when you're trying to build new products and new lines of business. The spirit of Vodafone is all about being customer-centric, having the courage to take calculated risks, not being afraid to fail, and having the ambition to think about and create the future. I'm really happy that everyone in my team embodies that spirit. Additionally, most of my team are hybrid
Varun Krishnan
EXECUTIVE BIO
Although the company is categorically focused on technology, people are at the heart of everything it does – both the employees and the customers. Reflecting on his own team in the FinTech department, Krishnan explains how they strive to build the FinTech element of Vodafone: “I'm really lucky to have a fantastic team of leaders and experts; their energy and ambition gives me confidence that we can achieve great things.”
Varun joined Vodafone in 2011 from Booz & Company (Strategy&) where he worked with TMT clients across Middle East, Africa and Asia. placed to offer its customers the best tech that address real customer needs. Now, the company is one of the global leaders in the Internet of Things, as Krishnan outlines: “We've got over 150 million connected devices, and we are live with the platform in multiple continents. All of these things that we're doing are working towards enabling an inclusive and sustainable digital society.”
TITLE: MANAGING DIRECTOR, FINTECH LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM
VARUN MANAGINGKRISHNANDIRECTOR - FINTECH, 6
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The technology platform powering businesses that offer insurance Learn more Increase program profits through process automation Digitise, simplify and enhance the end-to-end insurance customer experience Quick market launch through API integration and no code architecture A FinTech Global InsurTech100 company
EIP: Insurance is an industry ripe for Learnchangemore
On “I’veHemburrowVodafone,added:workedinthis industry for a while and it’s quite refreshing when a company like Vodafone has such a customer focus. They want great onboarding and a streamlined claim experience as well. So that’s why our partnership works well”.
EIP Vodafoneenablesto give their customers an end-to-end online experience. COO Ed Hemburrow explains why digitalisation is vital to insurance. A partner with Vodafone for over a decade, EIP is at the forefront of digitising and automating the servicing of insurer’s products. EIP’s proven software delivers both increases in customer NPS (net promoter score) and program profitability. The relationship with Vodafone has evolved from one of an advisory service, helping them set up insurance products, towards an array of services designed around the customer’s needs. As Hemburrow puts it: “We’re more than just a tech provider.” “We saw a gap, having worked in this industry for a while. We know that the vast majority of people are good, honest customers just trying to get a phone or device back in their hands as soon as possible, because they run their lives through them,” said Hemburrow. EIP helped Vodafone to automate the insurance process and bring it online. Customers can now go through an endto-end claim process, including getting an automated decision, in less than a minute and a half. “It’s super slick and easy. We’re taking the pain out of it. By designing a journey for the vast majority of Vodafone customers that have genuine claims, we know at that ‘key moment of truth’, they will get a great experience. We re-engineered and automated the process to be digital-first and allowed customers to self-serve,” he said.
Personalised products for customers One of the priorities for EIP is to associatedpricedpersonalisedcreateproducts,accordingtotherisk,rather than actually just the device that a customer has. They’re already working with Vodafone to bring that into play.
300mn+Mobilecustomers28mn+Fixedbroadbandcustomers22mn+TVcustomers150mn+IoTdevicesconnected1982Yearfounded€45.6bnRevenue2022
“We've had our carrier billing platform since the early to mid-2000s. This was originally set up for customers to charge for things like ring-back tones to the Vodafone bill. We've since evolved this to allow customers to purchase digital content. This is enabled across our mobile, fixed and TV customer base. So all of our customers have access to this platform in order to consume digital apps and OTT content.”
The carrier billing platform addresses customer needs around convenience and security, allowing them to pay for their digital content on their bill as well as underpinning the company’s ability to bundle mobile content such as Spotify and Netflix with its tariffs.
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Still in its early stages, the FinTech part of Vodafone’s business comprises the company’s carrier billing and digital payments platform, its insurance business, its device financing and Device Lifecycle Services (DLS) business.
For the insurance part of its business, Vodafone is focused on adding to its existing smartphone services by offering smartphone insurance to its customers. While in the past this has largely been a retail only product, it has now evolved to an omni-channel OTT digital insurance product that offers customers ultimate cover and flexibility. These two lines of business are crucial to the FinTech team.
workers who sit globally across markets, but we work together as one across commercial and technology team to deliver. Having that strong sense of vision and strong sense of purpose helps teams across markets work towards a common goal,” he adds.
Addressing customer needs in the FinTech space
Commenting on this, Krishnan says:
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Varun Krishnan, Managing Director FinTech at Vodafone Group
VARUN KRISHNAN MANAGING DIRECTOR - FINTECH, VODAFONE
“The third line of business is one that we’ve just set up,” explains Krishnan. “This is our whole end-to-end Device Lifecycle Services business.
“At Vodafone, we are really focused on sustainability and our impact on the planet. Offering compelling trade-in and financing solutions helps support our objectives: financing helps customers spread the cost of their devices over long periods; trade-in helps customers get good value for their old devices. Refurbishing and reusing these traded-in devices allows us to extend the lifecycle of these devices and enable the circular economy. All of this is enabled by a very simple end-to-end digital experience that makes the process of buying a new or refurbished device with Vodafone really easy andIntransparent.”additiontothese three lines of business, Krishnan shares that he is fortunate enough to have a “fantastic innovation vodafone.com
“Culture is everything when you're trying to build new products and new lines of business”
Welcome Your personal MyOperator LaunchPad Let's get started Making lifecyclessmartphoneassmartasthedevices One tech company is changing the way mobile carriers manage their customers’ devices. What does that mean for smartphone customers? MCE. Mobilizing Customer Experience
Trade-in Uplift
Grade Variance
MCE helped Vodafone UK seize the opportunity, with a fully digital omnichannel trade-in solution, including a guaranteed price, enabling it to become the country’s trade-in leader. The price guarantee, an elusive goal due to discrepancies in grading, was enabled by MCE’s innovative, highly accurate AI-powered remote grading technology. The app put users (and their reps) in control while ensuring Vodafone achieved better margins. “When the customer engages with diagnostics to grade their device; the valuation is fully transparent. There’s a lot more trust in the final price.”
For more information on how MCE is Mobilizing Customer Experience for the worlds largest mobile operator brands get in touch with Eitan at eitan@mce-sys.com
Eitan Linker is Chief Commercial Officer at MCE systems, a device lifecycle management pioneer which transforms key device lifecycle moments – from set up, to service and care, to upgrade and trade-in.
Digital Mix
Vodafone UK more than doubled its volume of trade-ins in the first year
MCE digitizes, automates, and connects these journeys so they’re fast, accurate, and yield a clear, actionable view of each device. It surfaces the smartest options at every moment, from repair alternatives to upgrade offers - empowering customers to get more value from devices, while spending less time managing them, and enabling reps to have more rewarding customer interactions.
Trade-in discrepancies were reduced to low single digits
MyOperator accessible trade-in led to a large increase in the digital mix
Linker points to trade-ins as the untapped opportunity. “There is too much friction and uncertainty about price in the current tradein process and that’s depressing volumes and leading to churn,” he explains. With more than $200 billion worth of mobile phones just sitting in drawers across Western Europe and North America, operators and customers are missing out on a huge opportunity.
Consequently, Vodafone UK more than doubled its volume of trade-ins in the first year, lowered discrepancies, improved NPS, and reduced trade-in times, becoming the UK’s top carrier for trade-ins. It also increased upsells to premium plans and increased the digital mix. Vodafone led the market leading to a reduced mix of Never Traders of 89% in 2020 to 47% in 2022.
“Carriers today are fighting over price,” says Eitan Linker, “instead of giving customers a truly differentiated experience.” He adds, “once the customer is happy, everything else falls into place.”
team that are looking at topics that are a bit more into the future, such as our role in the Metaverse and what do future financing models look like.
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“There's a lot of people working together on bringing our payments and insurance products and services to customers. SAFe allows us to have one budget and one end-to-end backlog of activities that we are working together on delivering collectively,” Krishan notes.
The Managing Director goes on to add that Vodafone’s global products and services organisation has been moved to work in a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). As a result, Vodafone now operates as one end to end delivery organisation in squads across its commercial teams, product teams, technology teams, global platform teams and local market execution teams.
By July 2021, Vodafone was purchasing 100% of its electricity from renewable sources in Europe. The company plans to roll this out to the rest of the world by 2025.
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Equally, this framework feeds back into Vodafone’s customer centricity as it gives customers a straightforward and easy-to-
“We spend a lot of time thinking through customer journeys. The key thing is addressing customer pain points around transparency and flexibility when it comes to FinTch products and in the process building a trusted brand. If you can really make things simple and transparent for customers – no fine print, everything is as it says on the tin –we can create that trust. That's the thinking we use to build out our customer journeys.”
“We spend a lot of time journeys”throughthinkingcustomer
One key business partner to Vodafone is Assurant, a global provider of risk management products and services. Assurant has been Vodafone’s insurance partner for years on device insurance, according to Krishnan.
“We are really keen to work with bestin-class partners to bring some of these propositions to life. We rely on partnerships to deliver great value to our customers, as well as a great experience that's enabled by cutting edge technology,” he adds.
Looking to partners to secure Vodafone’s future in FinTech
navigate customer journey, which Krishnan outlines:
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VARUN MANAGINGKRISHNANDIRECTOR - FINTECH, VODAFONE
“While we have the ambition to grow, we also have the humility to recognise that there are partners out there that have a depth of knowledge and access to technology that would take us years to build. Partnerships are really crucial. They can help us accelerate our learning curve and also give us quick access to technology that will be expensive and time-consuming for us to build ourselves,” explains Krishnan
As Vodafone is relatively new to the FinTech space, the company knew there would be opportunities to learn and grow by embarking on strategic partnerships with others.
“I'm delighted to say that we'll continue this journey with them as we expand into vodafone.com
101737 Helping people thrive in a connected world In partnership with our clients, Assurant supports more than 300 million customers across the globe. We develop innovative products and services that support, protect and connect major consumer purchases. And we do this for some of the world’s most recognised brands, enabling us to anticipate the evolving needs of consumers, and continually deliver an enhanced customer experience.
“We focus on everything that sits around the device,” Assurant UK Managing Director Chris Woolnough explains. One of Assurant’s brands is Pocket Geek, cancel at any time. Protect Your Bubble provides valuable real-time insights for the company based around consumer behaviour, which it can use to hone its B2B propositions. Culture vitally important to the way Assurant does business Woolnough says that culture is particularly important to Assurant. “Our culture is pretty special and we call it the Assurant Way,” he says. “Within that, we have a set of values. Those values are common sense, common decency, uncommon thinking and uncommon results. Everything we do hooks back into those.”
Assurant: protecting and connecting consumer tech
Today’s consumer has over 20 different wifi-enabled gadgets in their home, underlining the size of the gadget protection opportunity. Assurant – a leading global business services company that supports, protects and connects major consumer purchases, serving more than 300mn customers – is focusing on insurance products and services that empower consumers to protect those gadgets.
This platform of trust has allowed it to enjoy a
Assurant is providing a range of protection products and services to help people thrive in a connected world, partnering with Vodafone to bring protection to life.
A partnership with Vodafone built on trust and great service “Shared platform of corporate trust and commitment to customer service, is the foundation of the long working relationship Assurant enjoys with Vodafone. Assurant partners with Vodafone to provide a range of protection products and services to let consumers customise coverage for their devices. Assurant provides Device Insurance to Vodafone as a benefit for business customers and offers Vodafone Rapid, a replacement service that can deliver a new device in under four hours. Next, the two companies are preparing to make multi-gadget insurance available, starting in one market, and then rolling out with technical support.” EIP “EIP and Vodafone both prioritise the use of smart technology to deliver great customer experiences that are simple, reliable, and transparent, which is why the partnership has flourished for well over a decade now. “EIP is a customer centric organisation, focused on developing technology that removes unnecessary frictions from the insurance customer journey” says Ed Hemburrow, COO of EIP. “In our relationship with Vodafone, we work in a cross organisational team that has a laser focus on providing customers with market leading products, great value and fantastic experiences using smart technology and innovation. We’re delighted to be working with Vodafone as part of their FinTech journey, and excited to reimagine the customer experience as we move into new insurance categories.”
MCE Systems Working with MCE Systems and incorporating their platform has enabled us to deliver best-in-class products and services with a very high standard of security and user experience as part of our objective to bring pioneering digital technologies and solutions to the market.
Together we continue to turn the challenges of digital transformation and evolving customer expectations into competitive advantages”, said Varun Krishnan, Vodafone’s Managing Director for FinTech. “Today, the MCE Systems ecosystem is used to enhance the trade-in and upgrade journeys for millions of Vodafone customers, across the United Kingdom, Germany, Romania, and Greece, enabling them to get a guaranteed price for their old devices. We are looking forward to continuing this collaboration with MCE to fuel our digital-first, Device Lifecycle Services initiatives.
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“Anothercover.partner that's crucial when it comes to this cutting-edge technology that we are utilising is MCE. MCE is our software partner that has a fantastic digital diagnostic platform. We use that in our insurance claims and we are also using that now in the new device trade-in product that we've just launched in our markets,” he continues. With all of these partners supporting Vodafone as it continues on its journey in the FinTech space, Krishnan explains that it is a great time for the company –particularly for those in his department: “The journey that we are on is very exciting.
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Vodafone is the FinTech and mobile payments leader in Africa. The M-PESA FinTech platform in Africa enables 52 million people to benefit from access to mobile. vodafone.com
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The next 18 to 24 months, in terms of our FinTech ambitions specifically, are centred around the transformation from being a pure device insurance player to a multicategory insurance player and to really scale our DLS platform.” He concludes: “We are working on optimising the features, the journeys and the go-to-market approach to build scale quickly. We want to get more markets on board on our global platforms and really get this whole space around device lifecycle services that support our planet ambitions across all our markets.” our first new category, which is multigadget home tech insurance. We also rely on Assurant to bring us the best in regulatory expertise, as well as helping us to think across our footprint and working with our sales channels to talk to customers about their choices when it comes to insurance in the right Additionally,way.”
VARUN MANAGINGKRISHNANDIRECTOR - FINTECH, VODAFONE
Vodafone has partnered with EIP, with whom it has worked for “a long time”, according to Krishnan. “EIP supports us with our end-to-end claims management and our claims handling platform, and they also support us in responsibly marketing and talking to customers about their choice of insurance
“Clearly, the journey that we are on is very exciting”
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