The Chief Executive Officer of MTN Group Fintech, Serigne Dioum has reaffirmed his outfit’s commitment to driving financial inclusion across Africa, leveraging innovative solutions to empower individuals and businesses.
Recounting the Group’s journey, he noted that it currently boasts of over 70 million customers and an ecosystem of more than 2 million merchants across 16 operations.
He also highlighted the company’s success in lending, with over US$2 billion disbursed in loans to customers last year, stressing that it is working towards building Africa’s largest FinTech platform by African to serve Africans.
“Our FinTech journey began in 2007 in Uganda, and since then, we have expanded our footprint across 16 operations… From humble beginnings as a wallet business, we have diversified our services to include payment, international remittance, lending, and insurance… And now we have a business with more than 70 million users and more than 2 million merchants across our footprint, which is 16 operations.”
Despite significant growth, Mr. Diuom pointed out that 90 percent of transactions in Africa are still cash-based, indicating the vast untapped potential for digital financial services.
As such, he emphasised MTN’s role in addressing the prevalent cash-based transactions and low penetration of credit and insurance services through innovative solutions and strategic partnerships.
He added that MTN Group Fintech is leveraging new technologies such as blockchain and AI to enhance services and improve credit scoring.
“Our vision is to create a seamless ecosystem where anyone, from anywhere, can access financial services with ease. We think that the future for Africa, when it comes to Fintech is bright, because the African population is still growing, and the penetration of Fintech is still low. When it comes to fintech penetration, I think the number that comes to mind is that 90% of transactions are still cash-based.
“For us, we do not compete against any bank, but we compete against cash. And our work every day is to identify the use cases that are still touch base, and see how we can digitalize them for our platform,” he noted.
He assured that with focus on impact, innovation, and collaboration, his outfit is poised to shape the future of financial services in Africa, saying that it views industry players not as competitors but as partners in driving economic growth and financial inclusion.
“When you look at where we are today, we have more than 100 million of our customers who are registered in our platform, and we have more than 1 million agents and have more than 2 million businesses also, who are also within our ecosystem,” he added.
He also cites the launch of the its application programming interface (API) platform as a significant step towards enabling partners to seamlessly integrate with the ecosystem.
He made these remarks during his presentation on ‘Fintech for Inclusion: Pushing Beyond Innovation to Impact’ at the 3i Africa summit, where he shared MTN Fintech Group’s role.
“As we look ahead, the future for MTN Fintech remains bright and filled with opportunities to transform lives on the African continent. With your continued support and ecosystem partnership. We are poised to achieve even greater success in the years.
“It is very important to make sure that whatever we do, it makes impact and it helps also communities to get a better financial inclusion to be financially included, and also to help them to enable them to really increase the welfare of the communities,” he noted.
