Mr. Selorm Adadevoh, the Chief Executive Officer of arguably the largest telecommunication network in Ghana, MTN, has stated that though MTN transactional volumes are high, the potential of the informal economy to become a formalized financial services economy, is much larger.
Speaking on PM express, he iterated that Ghana’s ecosystem is in the early stages compared to Kenya’s ecosystem due to lack of innovation to develop the systems.
“If you look at the volume of transactions per user, per month, it is somewhere in the five transactions per user range; it is probably gone up a little bit now with COVID and everything but, it is still close to that number. If you compare that to a more mature market; Kenya for example, it is forty-five times that number.
“So again, our ecosystem is still very immature and the reason for that is, as a platform provider; MTN is a platform provider, you need the Fintech ecosystem to develop around these platforms were the innovation comes from. So, things like lending, customizing services for businesses; all these things will sit on that platform layout which will have multiplayers and you start to expand that ecosystem.”
Buttressing his claim, he stated that “Someone could easily develop a solution for paying taxi drivers that sit on top of the money ecosystem. When it happens it means, taxi drivers could do very quick accounting of how much they earn during the day, they know which amount of money came from taxi payments, verses which ones came from a personal contribution to the driver. So, these are all tools that today, exists in Kenya for small businesses to use to manage their businesses,” he said.
He further stressed that, all the innovations to improve Ghana’s ecosystem is driven by Fintech and other software developmental companies.
“If we get excited about the amount of money that is going through the system today, it may blind us from the opportunity that is really ahead of us, and I will like to just iterate that, if we really want to put our energy into innovation; if we really want to drive and accelerate the Fintech ecosystem, that we will see this maturity start to play out.”
However, Mr. Adadevoh intimated that, fraud is one of the major challenges MTN face.
He further explained that the fraud that is experienced in Ghana, is largely social engineering. According to him, “education is the biggest barrier to fight social engineering”
Without mincing words, he explained that, as long as the customer is educated about the risk of fraud and is more sophisticated as a consumer in that regard, naturally will have a defense against the fraudsters.
Though the telecommunication network hasn’t communicated physically, with community education groups, the CEO of MTN is optimistic that, media education is playing a role in helping curb the activities of the fraudsters.
“We have spent a lot of time, pre COVID, pushing out messages, during COVID, we increased that on radio a few times; we had quite a few different series of education. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to go on the ground, the plan we had was really to be on the ground and work with community education groups within the community to bring everybody together and talk about fraud and how they can prevent this.”
Still touching on fraud, the CEO of MTN reiterated that, the telecommunication industry should be coordinated to create a centralized fraud management database.
“Something that we are working through currently, so that if I report a fraudster, their ID details are recorded into that database, the registration details are recorded into that database and whatever network they are on, we can block that sim for a start”
With regard to the internal forces that are aiding with fraudsters outside, Mr. Selorm Adadevoh noted that, to deal with fraud, every industry has to be certain that their internal processes are tight enough to eliminate fraud as a whole.
He further revealed that, MTN Ghana has a framework that has elements such as the internal mechanisms, external opportunities and initiatives.
Meanwhile, he stated that MTN is very strict when it came to ethical issues and always improves its processes to eliminate risk of compromise.
He reassured customers that, steps were being taken in place to eliminate fraud in the country.
Weaving through the conversation, he noted that the unprecedented challenge that COVID-19 posed, propelled MTN Ghana to ascertain how the company was going to stay relevant and productive as an economy.
He iterated that, time was spent into probing how to ensure that MTN Ghana provided the best quality service even in a time of the COVID-19 pandemic, “So our first thinking was really, do we have the right infrastructure? Do we have the right capacity? Can we guarantee the right level of service and how do we make sure that, we do not add to the problems that COVID has introduced to our productivity as an economy and also from the stand point of our consumers, to ensure that we can keep them connected?” he said
According to Mr. Adadevoh, MTN Ghana had to ramp up efforts to ensure that services were delivered without being at wits ends.
“The second thing is that, during the pandemic itself, we had to continue to deliver the service. Therefore, we had to have our teams and our people go out working, ensuring that our sites are continuing to have fuel, power, they are up and running; where we have disturbances or interruptions, we fix them.
“That continuity of service meant that, we had to take a slightly different approach, where workers, were going home to figure out how to keep these critical maintenance team and our engineers continuing to work in a safe environment. So as much as to deliver a service, we do not risk the lives of valuable people”
In his closing remarks on the topic, he noted that, COVID-19 had heightened the importance of the digital and internet era. He stressed that, digitization is a necessity and it is MTN’s primary objective to deliver.
It can be recalled that MTN Ghana declared 2020, as the year of ‘Customer Digital Experience.’ According to Mr. Selorm Adadevoh, COVID-19 has accelerated that path of digitization for MTN.
