MTN wants you to use its MoMo service to avoid getting robbed, send remittances to other countries, run your small business with it, and buy pre-paid funeral cover. All with a mobile phone.
If you run a spaza shop, MTN wants to replace two point-of-sale (POS) devices (one for accepting card payments, the other for buying airtime, electricity and the lottery) with a single mobile terminal.
There are 9 million MoMO registered users in South Africa.
The relaunched MTN MoMo SA app offers this functionality, as well as making it easier for someone to sign up for an account. The MoMo Eazi account requires only a mobile number and a bank account, not an ID, says MTN’s chief financial services officer Bradwin Roper.
Users of the app will not pay service fees for buying airtime or data, as well as value-added services (VAS) like pre-paid vouchers for electricity, he adds.
Who wants to pay service fees anyway?
Of the many new financial packages being offered, he called the MyMTN Prepaid Funeral Khava his “favourite child”. It offers prepaid funeral cover for either six or 12 months, from R75, and when premiums are paid using MoMo, there will be no service fees.
Roper was also proud of the new MoMo Business Wallet and the POS device, which can sell VAS services as well as take card payments.
It offers zero fees for selling such vouchers and airtime or data, while cash deposits, unlike banks, are done for free.
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Meanwhile, MTN is the largest mobile operator in Africa and it’s leveraging its knowledge of the continent to offer aggressively cheap fees for remittances to 12 African countries.
MTN has 69 million MoMo users and 1.3 million active MoMo agents, says MTN SA CEO Charles Molapisi, adding MoMo is “an astounding product that is bringing the unbanked or underbanked into the digital economies with ease and simplicity”.
MTN customers in these countries will access the app without using their data, says Roper, while the mobile operator will only charge 4% fees for remittances. This is around half of the other remittance services he cited.