MTN banking still up and running
A news report quoted Nhleko as saying that, having signed up only 20 000 subscribers since it launched seven months ago, MTN Banking had failed to meet his expectations.
MTN says the news report was inaccurate. However, this does not mean the venture has not had problems.
MTN Banking CEO Jenny Hoffman says the company has had to cope with both regulatory and technical challenges.
Financial Intelligence Centre Act (Fica) regulations, which require customers to validate their ID numbers, makes it tedious to sign up to the service. Some of its customers’ Sim cards are also too old to use the facility.
The idea of providing financial services through cellphones is a relatively new one, so it may be too early to say whether MTN Banking will be successful. Hoffman says the venture should be judged a year from now.
If MTN is concerned about the performance of MTN Banking, it may be because the cellular operator has a different perception of what constitutes success.
Standard Bank has operated its own cellphone banking service for a number of years, and it has signed up only about 40,000 customers.
So, for MTN Banking to have secured 20,000 clients in seven months is not necessarily a bad effort.
But this number pales in comparison with the almost 1m cellular subscribers that MTN signed up in the six months to September 2005.
MTN Banking’s customer numbers also aren’t brilliant next to what some of the big banks have achieved.
First National Bank leads the market with 180,000 mobile banking customers. Absa has 150,000. But it compares favourably with Standard Bank and Nedbank. The latter has only just entered the market.
Mobile banking has been touted as a great way of providing the millions of South Africans that do not have bank accounts with access to basic financial services.
Oddly, rival cellphone banking providers are keen to see MTN Banking stay in business. They say they it would hurt the industry if one of its players were to give up. One of those worried is Wizzit, which is urging MTN to continue supporting its banking initiative.
Like MTN Banking, Wizzit is a standalone operation, not part of a large bank. Chief operating officer Brian Richardson says Wizzit had to face the same regulatory and technical obstacles. It overcame the problem of incompatible Sim cards by using technology that works with all Sim cards.
Wizzit, though, is also struggling with the Fica regulations. As many of its customers are poor and based in rural areas, Richardson says getting clients’ identity numbers verified is a challenge.
Not everyone is convinced that cellphone banking alone will solve the problem of SA’s large unbanked population.
A big challenge is convincing people who are used to dealing only in cash that they should adopt technology as a way of paying for goods and services, says Colin Donian, who heads the Mzansi Initiative, whose aim is to introduce low-cost banking.
Richardson admits it is not easy to convince people to use their cellphones for mobile banking but he is undeterred. "If people can access their money via their cellphones, they will," he says.
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