Mobile Transactions

Crew member of a very exciting ship

2011-07-17T23:05:00.000-07:00

My name is Juanita Schrader, about 8 months ago I became part of the accounts team of Mobile Transactions South Africa offices. I can safely say that I had no clue what I was getting myself into (I mean this in a good way LOL).

I am one of three finance administrators, the other two being Marissa Kruger and Charlton Meavers . We report to the Accountant Leshain Armstrong. In a nutshell, our duties consist of ensuring that all activities like send to banks, deposits, auto bank postings, etc are processed correctly to the banks and the system with the help of the customer care personnel Tasira Nkhata who works from the Zambia office. One of my responsibilities is to ensure that various accounts have adequate balances for these activities to happen. My other major responsibility is called the daily system and bank reconciliation. This is done daily and reconciles transactions on the banks and the system. If there are any discrepancies; then it is investigated. It is really a team effort. We work together, help each other to investigate and resolve queries and give feedback to customer care. Our work is very customer care orientated and at times can be very challenging as it would be in any other business. It is a difficult concept to grasp at times if you have not visited Zambia and seen the agents trading and doing business. When there are a challenges; we are in the spotlight and have all hands on deck to assist but when everything is smooth sailing then we give ourselves a pat on the back for a job well done.

We also provide services internally to other departments. E.g. purchase of bulk airtime, sending funds to work accounts, making payments as requested, assisting with analysis for month end processing on pastel.

This is not your ordinary 8-5 admin job. We have a very structured day and timelines for doing send to banks and checking deposits. We are involved in decision making and improving of procedure and processes which is great to know that you can make a contribution that can have an impact. It’s also pretty awesome; this is my first real job and I can truly say that these are the foundations of my career in finance. Just the other day, we imported and approved our first 1000^th automated Barclays’ batch and it felt fantastic to be part of such an achievement!

The IT Department and Accounting department are located in SA office. We recently moved into a bigger office which just goes to show we are growing .We are quite a young group of people which makes it an energetic and fun environment.

It is also a blessing to know that you have a job where you have a reason to wake up and say “oh yes I’m going to work” and not “oh work again”. So here’s to more growth personally and professionally as this ship continues on its journey to success!!

By Juanita Schrader

Finance administrator

A new type of agent

2011-07-08T01:43:00.000-07:00

We’ve decided to try to create a new model of MTZ agent. I’m sure the idea has been done in other industries before, but it’ll be a first for us.

Outside of the Champion Agents that we directly manage, we picture that there are two types of new agents out there: those that have money but no time or inclination to manage a shop; and those that have time to manage a shop, but no money. In this post I want to tell you about our idea for the first group.

To date we’ve been approached by probably a half-dozen Zambian business men and women always asking the same thing: “I have some money, so how can I become one of your agents?” And our approach was always the same: “Here’s the contract, and here’s how much money you need, and here’s how you can check your statement, do your daily cash reconciliation, and get customer care support if you need help.”

But we’ve realized that this message is absolutely inadequate. These are businesspeople with money and multiple businesses already. They have no time. No time for customer care, or statements, or daily cash reconciliation processes. Our system isn’t difficult to master, but it does require a fair amount of ongoing oversight.

Because of these facts of the business, the end result for these potential agents has always been the same: they sign up, they put in the money, they get a manager or a niece or nephew to run the shop, then within a month or so the money is lost/stolen/unaccounted for and they close up shop.

So we thought of something different. What if all these people had to do was put in their money and we provided all the day-to-day management by training a person at head office and giving them a percentage of the revenue? We’d share the revenue earned from commission, with the outcome being the businessperson gets a steady stream of income and we get a new, liquid agent.

We’re going to try it in Kitwe, a Copperbelt mining town. For us who are always tight on cash, it’s a way to free up a lot of untapped capital and grow the liquidity of our network. But also, the businesspeople that may invest also know of other business opportunities and could open new doors for our agents. If we can generate a healthy and low-risk return for businesspeople keen to invest their money, then it could be a way for us to use the age-old owner-manager dynamic to grow our agent network much faster and further.

Graham Lettner,

Agent Manager.

e-Vouchers: Transforming Local Economies

2011-06-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

A woman and her malnourished child walk to their local grocery shop to redeem a food voucher she received at the nearby government clinic. The grocer exchanges the voucher for a food basket containing locally produced and milled maize meal, the country’s staple food. The small-scale farmers who grew the maize bought their seeds and fertilizer from rural retailers, who were, in turn, subsidized by a local organization promoting sustainable agriculture. And all the seamless transactions in this localized economic ecosystem were made possible by a simple but transformational technology – electronic vouchers.

Zambia is a country of 12 million people in the heart of southern Africa. It is characterized by low population density, high poverty rates, and political stability. 70% of Zambians live in rural areas, 60% are engaged in agriculture, and 15% are affected by HIV/AIDS. Zambia is by all accounts one of the poorest countries in the world, ranking 150 out of 169 on the 2010 UN Human Development Index.

As such, Zambia is on the receiving end of millions of dollars of aid, and vouchers are becoming the preferred method of delivering it. Vouchers allow beneficiaries to become customers, giving them the power to choose and demand what they need from local retailers instead of receiving items that are shipped from half a world away. The idea behind vouchers works well in theory, but it has had problems on the ground. Paper vouchers result in long, bureaucratic paper trails. Retailers complain of delayed payments and donors of forgery, fraud, and a general lack of accountability.

Mobile Transactions Zambia Limited (MTZ) pioneered an e-voucher product in September 2009 as a cost-effective way for both development sector and government clients to deliver traceable subsidies to their intended recipients. The technology is simple: A scratch card with a unique serial number is given to a targeted beneficiary by a local institution, such as a clinic or farmer group.To ensure security, the vouchers are linked to individuals by their National Registration Card number. Once linked, they can be redeemed at retail agents chosen by the client. The agent processes the voucher by accessing MTZ’s online platform using a mobile phone, triggering an instant electronic payment into the agent’s MTZ account for the value of the goods given out, with a profit margin reflecting prevailing market prices. The agent can then use this electronic credit to order from suppliers, sell airtime, send money transfers, send it to a designated bank account, or access mobile banking services that MTZ’s other business units offer.

The e-voucher business model is driven by a set fee charged per e-voucher redeemed. This means that the e-voucher system is not economic at small volumes because of the management and system development costs of its delivery. Thus, MTZ has focused on improving the efficiency of its e-voucher delivery to reduce overhead costs per e-voucher and allow the company to effectively scale with more clients thus increasing total e-voucher numbers. The e-voucher business unit will be financially viable when it serves enough beneficiaries to cover costs and provide a stable profit margin.

To date, MTZ has redeemed 280,000 e-vouchers for almost 60,000 beneficiaries in Zambia. Our clients include the World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Conservation Farming Unit, and CARE International. Our partners include government clinics and the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives. The e-voucher system has already been replicated across sectors – both food and agricultural inputs – with future expansion planned into health (delivery of subsidized drugs, such as anti-retroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS patients) and welfare (social cash transfers targeted at the poorest 10% of the population). It has also scaled regionally, with food vouchers redeemed in Zimbabwe since June 2010 and Mozambique since March 2011.

The social and economic impact of this product is enormous. Firstly, e-vouchers irrefutably improve the cost-effectiveness of current aid projects. One of our customers has reported 40% cost savings over conventional methods of distributing aid with greatly reduced inventory reconciliation issues. At a time when aid is under fire for being ineffective and inefficient this is great news and it has been recognized as such by donors, small businesses, and beneficiaries alike.

Secondly – and most significantly - e-vouchers create a series of positive knock-on effects in the local economy and community. Aid agencies disappear into the background as local businesses become the face of product and service delivery. MTZ works almost exclusively with small businesses that are stalwart members of the community in order to ensure confidence and trust in the e-voucher. Relationships are strengthened between farmers, millers, retailers, government agencies, and the end customers as much-needed welfare is delivered to the community by the community itself. Instead of being undermined by conventional methods of development, the local economy thrives.

E-vouchers are a winning product in Zambia, but introducing them has not been without its challenges. Pricing the vouchers has been difficult from the beginning as clients did not immediately understand the size of the management and system development costs required to make the e-voucher system work. It was also difficult to maintain a steady stream of clients because of the transient nature of donor projects. It has taken time for MTZ to develop management processes that can scale-up and scale-down quickly and efficiently as voucher numbers fluctuate. However, with several proof-of-concept projects under their belt, MTZ is now developing a standard package, complete with flexible and customizable system features and back-end management practices, to take this to scale.

e-Vouchers enable aid agencies to drastically improve health, welfare, environmental, and livelihood outcomes in marginalized communities; they stimulate localized economic activity by working with local businesses and through local channels; and, they generate revenue for a company that is extending mobile banking services to those who need them most – the unbanked and unconnected. They are a cutting-edge product that will transform economies all over Africa.

This blog was submitted for the BOP competition and made it to the final round. It was written by: Thulasy Balasubramaniam and Graham Lettner

Hellenah Mwansa: Champion Agent

2011-05-30T22:53:00.000-07:00

My job involves selecting and training 20-something Zambians to start their own money transfer franchises in different towns all across the country. We call them our Champion Agents.

Hellenah Mwansa is one of these young agents I’m very proud of. She finished our training course in April and we promptly sent her up to Ndola, 400km north of Lusaka where she had been living, with instructions to find a location, set up a portable booth that she’d pick up at a town along the way, and start transacting.

But just two weeks into her new job she fell sick. Malaria, most likely. While she went to a health clinic and began treatment almost immediately, she was still almost completely incapacitated. Bedridden for a week, maybe more. During all of this all she asked me for was $10 to buy the vitamins and fruit juice the health clinic recommended she take.

Yet this past week when I drove up to visit her and a few of our other agents, she was cheerful, smiling, and had her shop back on track. She had arranged a deal with the manager of the YMCA to rent some space from her for her shop; had hired a girl, Linda, as her store assistant; and was out for the better part of the day handing out flyers to potential customers around town.

Almost all of our new agents are 20-somethings like Hellenah. They are who our company (Mobile Transactions Zambia; MTZ) will rely on to be the backbone of our network of financial transactions in Zambia.

Graham Lettner,

Agent Manager.

Passion, Pride, Pace and Professionalism

2011-05-19T01:46:00.000-07:00

It’s quite strange to think that less than 30 days ago I was working in a small town in Wales called Bedwas managing a large scale Welsh Government project subsidising Leadership and Management training for Small and Medium Sized businesses.Since first stepping into the old, cramped Cairo Road office I have been struck by the pace, enthusiasm and stretch of the work of Mobile Transactions. 16 working days into my short experience I have already developed and agreed a project plan aiming to pay 22,000 East Zambian Farmers with e-vouchers, braved the bus to Chipata and negotiated with almost 20 Zambian businesses.

There’s been a great deal that I have had to learn. As Brad puts it, there are no safety nets working for a start up business. Most tasks need to be undertaken independently – the processes and expert services of my corporate background simply do not exist. When I walk into a room with Zambia’s primary retailers of school books, or one of the biggest fertiliser importers, I have to rely on my own preparation and ability to present a competent and coherent proposition.

The opportunity is hugely rewarding for me and I don’t think I’m alone. I have seen all of MTZ’s people pushing themselves out of their comfort zone to develop new systems, strike new payments deals and forge a strong and stable agent network. When I return to work for Government, I hope that I will adopt this brave spirit and demand even greater hunger and accountability to do the work we do from those around me.

So what’s useful from the Welsh Government that MTZ can adopt? 16 days in, it’s a completely impossible assessment to try to make. However one issue might be that MTZ’s strengths could also be it’s weaknesses as it moves forward. Always stretching ourselves should not lead to over promising. A fast pace must not mean sacrificing support, when that is needed. Enthusiasm must not lead to burning out.

That’s why Mike’s plan for the company and the ambition to develop a coherent structure for MTZ’s work is absolutely crucial. Good governance and support structures shouldn’t stifle and can provide a framework that means that a business isn’t always out of its comfort zone. This means discipline, and will usually mean some changes. The best ideas come from all parts of businesses so there must be a space for people to share and debate them confidently and openly.

The Civil Service’s motto in the UK is Passion, Pride, Pace and Professionalism. MTZ absolutely embody these qualities. The challenge now is to enshrine these in a framework for a very bright future.

By The Welsh Civil Servant,

Tom Taylor.

Playing both sides

2011-05-06T03:19:00.000-07:00

I was in Kenya earlier this month attending a Grassroots Business Fund regional workshop. While I was there, I took a couple extra days to skulk around Kibera market and travel out to Kisumu on Lake Victoria all in the name of seeing M-PESA agents as work. Being the most successful mobile banking market in the world, there was lots to learn from them.

In Kisumu I met Victor, PEP Intermedius’ agent manager, who graciously spent the entire morning fielding my questions and querying me with some of his own. Their operation is more fluid and established than ours, and the number of agents PEP manages (150, just 1% of all agents in Kenya) is equal to the total number of agents we have across Zambia.

What shows just how different the Kenyan mobile payments market is to Zambia’s is that PEP is just one of dozens of companies that manage agents for M-PESA. Here in Zambia, there’s only us. We manage 100% of all the agents in Zambia. In effect, we’re both PEP and M-PESA at the same time: we manage the agents and we run the mobile payments system.

It makes for a lot of work, and unfortunately less single-mindedness in our business goals, but it also offers a lot of opportunity. Instead of a tug-of-war between M-PESA and the companies managing agents, we can try to find a optimal balance between our mobile payments business system and our on-the-ground agent network. Hopefully it’s something that we’ll be able to use to our continuing advantage as the Zambian market develops.

Mobile Transactions hits Two

2011-04-09T04:41:00.000-07:00

Last week Mobile Transactions turned two years old after doing our first money transfer on April 1, 2009. Since then, we have achieved the following:

· -142,333 money transfers worth 41.7 Billion Kwacha; I remember at one point starring at the customer care computer screen, waiting for Money transfer number 100 in a single day, and when we hit it, we jumped for joy.

· -Over 300,000 e-vouchers worth over $6 million with transactions across 30 districts with the World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organisation, and Conservation Farming Unit.

· -10 Champion agents and 120 regular cash agents, the first Agent to ever be set up was Nato investments in Mazabuka, it was set up on the 29^th of March 2009 by our IT Support & Business Intelligence Manager Binoy George, Also Known As ‘employee number 3,’ and then Human resource manager Joseph Gondwe, we went on to set up 129 more.

· -24 staff across two offices, we are diverse team that is passionate about connecting the unbanked to financial services and driven to succeed

· -Best Mobile Start-Up in Africa http://mobilemoneyafrica.com/?,

· -$1.7 million of Dunavant cotton farmer payments

· -$500,000 in unbanked microfinance loan disbursements paid out through our agents

· -$1.5 million in banked payments

· -Successful launch of our supplier payments product with two milling companies and a dozen retail agents

There are many more achievements and I could go on and on. As we explore Thanks to everyone for their hard work and commitment to date, and join me in wishing Mobile Transactions a very belated Happy Birthday!!!

Memory Chirwa,

Brand Manager

Zoona Kwacha is born

2011-03-24T23:48:00.001-07:00

The Evolution of the first ever Mobile Transactions champion store on Cairo road Lusaka. On the far left, sales generators hand out flyers at the then white Cairo shop, center GBF's Sara Tylor strikes a pose at our ever so popular Cairo store. Below, Agent manager Graham Lettner (right) talks to store owner, Champion Agent Tresphold Mwango(Left)

The branding and re-branding processes would not go as smoothly without the full backing and support of our CEO Mike Quinn, seen here applying the first coat at our second shop along Cairo road,Lusaka. The result can be seen on the far right.

Katondo champion, on the left and center, works in progress and the final product at the bottom left.

Kitwe and Ndola champions are different from all our other champions as they are made of glass, see before and after pictures.

Zoona Kwacha is a combination of two words, Zoona meaning true or real and Kwacha meaning morning and the currency of Zambia. We combined these two words to come up with the word Zoona Kwacha which when translated in English means the ''The real Kwacha.'' To us the real Kwacha explains what we do which is to make people see the real value of their Kwacha when they transact with us.

A New Era

2011-03-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

My name is Michael Bwalya, I am the Ordering and Supplier Payments Sales Assistant.Since December 2010, Mobile Transactions had been developing an online ordering system that allows retailers to order products from suppliers. Initially retailers needed to have internet access on their premises, or needed the direct help of Mobile transactions field staff who carried laptops and wireless moderns to facilitate the transaction or on occasion they had to go to internet cafes. This posed obvious challenges on all the parties involved, however February 2, 2011 marked the dawn of a new era when the service was introduced and could be accessed on any WAP enabled mobile phone and the first transaction of this nature in the history of this country was made when a retailer successfully ordered 200 bags of mealie meal. This might very well be the dawn of a new era for retailers and suppliers on the Zambian markets and a rather distinct step towards a cashless Africa.

THE CHALLENGE

The product has been well received on the Zambian market, the number of orders made on mobile phones has been rising since the first transaction last month, as noted by Thulasy Balasubramaniam, the product manager “the product saves retailers the trouble of running into town searching for the right price. The system makes market prices more transparent, reduces the risk of carrying cash in hand and for the suppliers the product and gives them access to new retailers”.

The product has so far been used by over 30 retailers in Lusaka and a little over 5 retailers on the Coppperbelt, and all these are World Food Program voucher retailers who are expected to redeem electronic vouchers at least twice every month and thus have access to electronic credit and can easily make orders. Further these retailers are guaranteed at least over 200 beneficiaries with electronic vouchers every month, and this enables them to make large volumes of orders on the system.

However the planned ending of the WFP voucher programme by WFP has posed a challenge for the retailers and the team (Kanji, Chris and I) Vouchers provided the retailers with the much needed electronic credit to facilitate the transaction, and provided a market for the retailers to make huge orders of mainly maizemeal for the WFP beneficiaries on the system. However even in the absence of the electronic vouchers we have had a dozen retailers who are willing to come into town and make deposits into their Zoona-Kwacha accounts so that they can be credited with electronic funds and make orders. Our challenge going forward is to implement a plan that will provide easy access to electronic credit , and further to capture retailers who may not be part of the WFP voucher program, show them the value of the service, and provide them with easy access to electronic credit.

As earlier mentioned the other challenge is to increase the volume of orders on the system especially now that the WFP voucher program has been suspended. This means providing retailers with as many products in the system as there are in their shops. One Wholesaler has so far been moving with our vision and has been supplying non WFP orders to Kanyama, Chawama, Kalingalinga Matero communities and other locations within Lusaka. The trick is to add more suppliers who are able to deliver to retailers and who stock fast moving consumable products.

THE VISION

As a member of the Mobile Transactions staff particularly of this team spearheading the sale of this product my vision is to see every product on the Zambian market that can be bought and sold be accessed on our system, a situation where our retailers can easily convert funds from there bank accounts into electronic credit on their Kwacha accounts only by the click of the button on there mobile phones and make orders with ease. This product has been launched on uncharted waters thus the limit should only be our lack of imagination.

Mobile Transactions holds its first Award ceremony

2011-03-04T06:27:00.001-08:00

The Mobile Transactions offices were buzzing with a lot of excitement because the CEO Mike Quinn had just announced that we had been crowned best Mobile Start up in Africa http://mobilemoneyafrica.com/?p=3074 and that he was throwing a party to celebrate.

The celebration kicked off at 3:00 Pm and every one from the Zambian office showed up in full celebration mood. What they did not know was that Management had secretly planned to combine this timely event with its own Mobile Transactions Award ceremony.

The ceremony according to Mike was to award the most deserving employees and encourage them to work hard and reach Excellency. Two awards were handed out as follows:

The first award was ‘Employee of the year 2010’ which was scooped by Teddy sampa, who serves as the Deputy Agent manager, His role in agent management is integral as he operationalises service to agents, champion agents and money transfer customers. He also contributes to the continuous improvement of agent management systems and process and delivers agent training. Teddy has been with the organisation since February 2009, and since then he has given his all to the job.In his speech Teddy thanked Management for this important recognition.

‘’ I am very humbled to have received this award, It is ecause management believes in me and has given me a lot of opportunities to explore my capabilities.’’ Said Teddy.

The second award was ’Champion of the year 2010’’ which Michael Kapili Sakala received.

Michael has managed to set up four champion stores all by himself, he has been known to take a lot of initiative in running his business. He dedicated his award to fellow champion Agent Tresphold Mwango and the Customer Care department.

Mike Quinn declared the Mobile Transactions award ceremony as an annual event where deserving employees would be awarded for their hard work.

‘’We provide exciting opportunities for our employees to gain experience in an emerging industry and if you emulate Teddy and Michael, you will be rewarded.’’ Mike Quinn. CEO, Mobile Transactions.

Challenges of Customer Care

2011-02-28T23:24:00.000-08:00

Hi my name is Tasira Nkhata; I am the lady behind the Customer care line. I have been working for Mobile Transactions since May 2010.

My role at Mobile Transactions is an interesting one; I am the lady who makes sure I put a smile on everyone’s face. Especially the agents and Customers, this is not always easy. So I take Graham’s advice (Graham is the Agent Manager) which is speak to a customer with a smile on your face and they will know you are smiling when talking to them and I think it has helped a lot.

I can’t say that I always make my customers happy because I always can’t do everything they ask of me. A practical example is when they ask me to give them the four digit PIN code which is meant to be a secret between the Sender and the Receiver. I in turn request that they get the PIN from the Sender and if the sender has forgotten the PIN they need to get back to the Agent. This makes the Sender very unhappy because they think I can see everything. What the customers do not understand is that the PIN code is a security PIN number which secures their money and therefore I have no way to view it.

The other challenge is that of the ‘Send to Bank’, a feature that allows Agents and customers to send money to any bank of their choice directly from their Zoona Kwacha Account. Agents want to come here and kill me when their Send to Bank is processed a minute or a second late. I believe the Accounts department gets sick and tired of my emails!

I believe I have the best job in the company reason being I speak to so many people that I have never met and they relate to me quite well. It was not like this in the beginning, the Agents were very unfriendly to me. This was one of the biggest challenges I faced as the new customer Care lady, it was requested of me to memorise every Agent’s name and numbers.

Customers overlook the importance of the 4 digit pin that they enter when doing a transaction I believe that all the Agents should educate the Customers on PIN security. The Marketing department has had posters made on the importance of the PIN.

The Agent network I believe has improved greatly from the time I came to date, Agents are now sending SMS to order the branding and Books, they also use SMS to give us feedback on our service.

With the fast growing rate of the agent network it is a sure bet we will be doing more transactions in weeks to come!

My last words are I would love to see everyone take time and walk to the customer care table and answer one or two calls or make a call to an Agent. We all need to show our Agents love!

A Historic Moment for Mobile Transactions

2011-02-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

On February 2, 2011, at 18:41pm ,a Mobile Transactions agent made an order AND paid for 200 bags of roller meal for a total value of K6,000,000 (USD$1250) using their mobile phone. This might very well be the first time anyone in Zambia has done anything like this. In two years time, when every retailer in Zambia is using their mobile phone to order from their suppliers and we are rolling this product out in new countries, this will be a historic event to look back on.

Starting in December, Mobile Transactions has been quietly developing a potentially transformational product. It's an online ordering and payments system that can be accessed on mobile phones. The idea is that retailers can log on to the system on their phones, search for the products they want - anything from cooking oil to bars of soap to fertilizers - and instantly make orders and payments using their Mobile Transactions account. Suppliers can add new products, update their pricing, and offer delivery/collection options to the retailers.

It's an online, cashless marketplace where everyone wins. Retailers save the hassle (and danger) of running around town with cash in hand, searching for the right price, making orders, and paying for transport to get the goods back to their shop. Suppliers get access to new retailers, have the opportunity to increase sales, and save on the huge risks involved with handling cash. Smaller retailers and suppliers, in particular, stand to gain a lot, as the system opens up the market and makes prices more transparent.

The vision for this product is a grand one, but the process of getting there will likely be more subtle. Our job is to build a complete solution for retailers and suppliers that is so good that they propagate it themselves. It's a bit like Facebook in that way - we want to create a product that initial clients gain more value from by bringing their current business contacts on board. Going viral, creating network effects, whatever you want to call, that's what we're aiming for.

We're at the early stages now, starting with a product that is ubiquitous in Zambia's urban economy - mealie meal, the country's staple food. From there, we hope to bring on basic household goods and agricultural inputs and eventually any product that can be bought and sold. The possibilities are endless but the challenge immense. Can this technology disrupt a cash-based economy? I think it can, if we get the product right, so that's the goal for right now.

Thulasy Balasubramaniam

Ordering and Supplier Payments System Manager

Getting Back Into Management

2011-02-09T03:39:00.000-08:00

As a company we went away on a strategic breakaway a few months back and near the end there was a moment of absolute celebration from Mike our CEO when he declared:

“Yes, I finally have Brad in the Organigram”.

I had just been appointed Mobile Transactions Zambia Chief Sales Officer, reporting to Mike as CEO, and with four Sales Vice Presidents reporting to me.

So that has got me to put pen to paper and do my second blog.

I had managed for as long as possible, the last two hugely enjoyable years, to be the business lone ranger: Heading off to new markets and developing new products and channels. While at times effective, equally at times disruptive, times were a changing and my wheeler dealer days in Mobile Transactions were fading fast.

The business has evolved and more than ever what we needed was: focus, discipline and most important: implementation and performance results, basically good management of people and process.

The brief was clear: One market (Zambia), four products (Money Transfers, Vouchers, Micro Finance payments and our new Mobi Ordering and Supplier Payments module (now this is a cool product)) and make it sing.

Going Back to my Roots

It was time to shake off the cob webs and think back to the days when I was a Commercial Director of an MNO and the Managing Director for Zambia of an International Paint brand.

The stresses of a startup are such that Keith our COO who joined us four months ago from an International bank Skyped the following to me the other day when we were reminiscing about corporate days:

[1/20/2011 5:38:02 PM] Keith Davies: It seems like such a long time ago that I've almost forgotten, but that is how good businesses are run. The budget is a function of the strategy and then the people are managed to the budget which in turn should ensure that the strategy is executed. So it is absolutely key that we actually operationalize this budget.

Managing People

One of the biggest challenges in a role like this is managing people.

I hope this comes out right but growing up in Africa and going to boarding school in South Africa from 7 years old I have been bought up in a hierarchical structure with pecking orders and when it is your turn at the top of the pile, well make hey while the sun shines. Given this background and a fair whack of confidence I have never been shy stepping forward in almost any situation. Being in charge and being both accountable and driving things forward is probably something I would embrace rather than pass over.

In most of my past management experience it was on the whole relatively autocratic – both in terms of how I was managed and how I managed my teams. Ten years ago that is how businesses where run here, middle management development was only just starting to be taken seriously, building strategic input from the ground up unheard of, jobs were extremely scarce and if you were a middle manager and were lucky enough to have one you settled in, did not rock the boat and mostly did what you were tasked with. It was a very confining management environment and one of the main reasons I went off to start my own business with my brother.

Fast forward to 1^st January this year and a quick assessment of the VP’s I was being tasked with managing. While no one individual is the same there were certainly some common traits:

· Super bright and capable

· Bullet proof in their inexperience

· Great qualifications

· Very worldly, well travelled and well versed in life

· Humble, good stock

· Really focused on learning and personal development

In addition, lots of opportunity, be it jobs in China, offers of acceptance for MBA’s from the very best International Business Schools etc, certainly attractive options on the table for them, and rightfully so given their caliber and attitudes.

Certainly the take it or leave it, or I am in charge approach would have ensured a quick mutiny and departure of absolutely critical skills.

This had to be countered by the reality that the business was not just strategic but also implementation. The implementation part takes rolling down your sleeves and putting your nose deep into the muck, dive further and just do stuff.

The Bigger Picture

Under Mike’s leadership the Chief Officers were tasked with creating a disciplined and structured business, hell even learning how to say no to all the opportunities and distractions out there.

In addition a lot of work went into aligning strategic focus and getting buy-in and then building budgets and process and plans.

From a sales perspective the key drivers were to generate revenues above budget, establish an effective sales pipeline, create manageable KPI’s and do not lose our skilled resources.

The Approach Taken

Our plan to retain key skilled staff has been to focus on how inspirational Mobile Transactions is

· We are not selling paint, we are a sexy industry

· We aim to be an inspirational African success story. We are tired of stories of Africa being Hollywood’s Blood Diamonds, Last King of Scotland and Hotel Rwanda. African entrepreneurs need role models and Mobile Transactions aspires to be.

Creates an environment where their work inspires them.

· Each VP has ownership and management of their department, products and channel at a Profit and Loss basis

Surround the team with quality people

· As a peer group they are working as a talented group

· They have direct access to Senior Officers who have a wide variety of Corporate and Self Made experience and skills

· Access to advisory Board Members to ensure they are exposed to best practice

· Tasked with up skilling or recruiting top staff reporting to them

Personal growth and development

· Opportunity to manage at a P & L basis

· Monthly reports for Board Submission

· Structured and professional reporting to CSO

· Management of a Key Strategic Project for each resource

· Use MTZ to grow personal network, we encourage open and transparent networking, and this space attracts interest

Open and transparent remuneration

· Everyone works for below market rates, not a great starting point

· We are all geared to closing an investment

· Incentives are only on the table with profitability above budget

· Share options are on the table with a proven track record

What the business needs

· Stuff just needs to get done

· Focus, discipline, implementation

· Best lessons are getting hand dirty and walking the floor

· But, at the same time some of the best and critical successes have come from direct strategic intervention from the VP’s. The introduction of internal Service Level Agreements and also the Effective, Efficient and then Expand model have all come and been driven to working policy by the group

Delegation is great but with clarity and accountability

· Whether ignorance is bliss or not, the worst thing young managers should face is delegation without very clear strategic direction and total clarity of what is expected and required. With focus and feedback, empowerment with zeal is a winner

So how are we doing?

You can never count your chickens before they hatch but the team is making good progress.

· Following on from 1,000% growth last year and budgeted growth of400% this year, measured against this we are 30% above budget on a GP basis YTD

· Sales strategies have been aligned with implementation plans by product

· KPI’s have been agreed and signed off

· Sales dashboard has been actioned

· Sales Pipeline is a breathing work in progress

· Sales Service Level agreements for all internal departments have been signed off

· Weekly sales meeting by VP with IT, accounts, customer care have been institutionalized

· Structured weekly sales meetings are in place

· VP’s are ensuring they walk the floor

· VP’s are managing P&L

What Next

Certainly it has been a productive start to the year and we look forward to proving this team has the ability to quote the mantra: Become effective, then efficient and then expand, and most of all, all the original team remains on board for now.

Truly Innovative

2011-01-17T05:16:00.000-08:00

Last week Mobile Transactions Zambia announced a partnership with the MasterCard Foundation and Microfinance Opportunities to explore how financial education training can increase uptake of mobile-based financial services while helping tens of thousands better manage their money.

After thorough market research, Mobile Transactions (MT) will test a strategy to increase usage of its consumer products through financial education. Taking learnings from prototype testing, MT will launch a pilot financial education program that will empower consumers through financial education, improve consumer product delivery and connect more consumers to MT products.

This is Mobile Transactions taking the leading-edge approach. There are three reasons why MT will continue to innovate and win in the consumer space;

Size – Mobile Transactions, compared to its telecom and banking competitors, are much smaller and more nimble. We have no layers of bureaucracy to cut through to get things done. Our development staff skype with our people on the ground, feeding back directly on products.

Speed – Mobile Transactions is faster. We do not wait for ‘Corporate’ to make decisions (which may not meet the needs of the market in Zambia.) We do not fight through layers of approval. We can develop a product quickly without queue-ing behind five other country offices.

People – Mobile Transactions staff are different. We don’t wear suits and ties. We don’t drive fancy cars. Managers have lived in the village and understand our customers better. We are passionate about connecting the unbanked to financial services and driven to succeed.

As we look forward to 2011, the consumer team is excited about our partnership with MasterCard and Microfinance Opportunities. It is the next step in the continual innovation of Mobile Transactions’ consumer offerings.

Dave Vosburg

Manager, Consumer Channels

Agent Growth

2011-01-06T23:42:00.000-08:00

My name is Graham Lettner. I manage the Mobile Transactions (MTZ) Agent network in Zambia.

This blog post has just one point: our Agent network has grown so much since a year ago that it’s near unrecognizable—and the growth is only going to speed up.

The first photo here is where we were at a year ago: Monze, Southern Province, signing up a few Dunavant cotton farmers for MTZ on-phone accounts. It took an hour of presenting, another hour of convincing, and two more hours to open all of the 15 accounts.

Less than a year later, based on changes to our payment model for farmers and the hardwork of a start-up in a fight for our life, we paid literally thousands of auto-registered farmers in Eastern Province in the space of weeks.

When we first started, every employee with a motor vehicle drove up and down Zambia cajoling, coaxing, and prevailing upon mom-and-pop shop o

wners to become Agents on our network. Heck, we gave out phones for free so they could transact and loaned out millions of kwacha for working floats. We didn’t see many of those phones or much of that money ever again—but it’s what was needed to get early traction.

This second photo shows how different things are today. Golden Kamasumba, an early Agent of ours in Mansa, Luapula Province has not only bought space in a new complex in town to have a second Agent location, but on his own initiative he painted his existing shop in our company’s colours. He’s one of our early Agents ready to expand on his own of many of our early Agents ready to expand on his own now that we've fully proven our value proposition.

Last thing: Thomas Friedman wrote about our company in the New York Times the other week. Okay, so it wasn't our company exactly, but a similar start-up in India getting the same kind of traction with mom-and-pop agents across the country. Really, the only difference is that he spent two weeks researching in India instead of Zambia.

Our business is hot, red hot. We’ve already got traction and now we’re picking up speed.

A Year in Review

2010-12-21T22:49:00.000-08:00

Dear all,

I would like to congratulate everyone on a year of big achievements at Mobile Transactions. Some key highlights include:

$15.5 million in transaction value processed over our system (1,100% increase from 2009)
100,000 consumer money transfers
250,000 electronic voucher transactions across 30 districts with the World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organisation, and Conservation Farming Unit
$1.7 million of Dunavant cotton farmer payments
$500,000 in unbanked microfinance loan disbursements paid out through our agents
$1.5 million in banked payments
9 Champion Agents successfully launched
272 active agents (up from 69 at the end of December 2009)
Successful launch of our supplier payments product with two milling companies and a dozen retail agents
Translation of our voucher system into Portuguese for roll-out with WFP Mozambique

These achievements should be celebrated as they did not come easily. It took a tremendous amount of hard work from everyone on the Mobile Transactions team in the face of adversity and very limited cash flow.

In addition, we added key members of our team over the course of 2010, including Keith Davies (Operations and Finance), Hans Hesse (Vouchers and IT Integration), Jon-David Steffen (IT Developer), Dave Vosburg (Finance), Bronwyn Baker (Financial Analyst), Hope Okoronkwo (Bulk Payments), Gertrude Makando (Supplier Payments), Tasira Nkhata (Customer Care), Michael Bwalya (Agents), Chris Mwaba (Vouchers) and Patrina Mwila (Admin).

Sadly, Claudius Fundi, one of our first employees, will be moving on in the new year. We wish Claudius all the best as he tackles the next challenge and the Mobile Transactions door will always be open.

We also received some great consultancy work, starting with Leanne Viviers, an Oxford MBA graduate who stayed on after a 2 month pro-bono consultancy by a team of 4 Oxford students (Santiago Alvarez, Natalie Miller, and Simon Jebreel). Engineers Without Borders Canada contributed a volunteer, Ben Campbell, to lead our Dunavant farmer payments project based out in Katete, Grassroots Business Fund pitched in with Sarah Taylor (legal), and PROFIT funded a regulatory consultant (Loretta Michaels). All of these individuals and organisational partnerships have added tremendous value to our business.

Finally, I would personally like to thank John Schroeder and Christine Phillpotts (GBF) for spearheading our advisory board, and Patrick Pichette for the personal mentorship and support. We are very humbled at Mobile Transactions to have such a great network to fall back on.

I am very confident 2011 will be a break-out year for Mobile Transactions. As the World Food Programme winds down their e-voucher project in January as part of their normal funding cycle we will focus on filling the gap with a boost in transaction volume from our very promising supplier payment product. Thulasy Balasubramaniam will be re-joining us to manage our Supplier Payments division, and there couldn't be a better person at a better time.

Our big target for 2011 is to close a Series A investment round to secure the necessary financial resources and investment partners to realise our full potential in Zambia and beyond. We are very excited by the interest investors have already shown, and if we can continue to grow and demonstrate our capability as a team, I have no doubt we are on the path to success.

On behalf of the Mobile Transactions team, I wish everyone the happiest of holidays and look forward to an even bigger year in 2011.

Best,

Mike Quinn

CEO

MTZL and NEXT year end highlights

2010-12-15T01:53:00.003-08:00

1. Introduction

Next Retail Limited made a donation of US$142,600 from the sale of its "Dare To Care" cotton range to the development/marketing costs associated with Mobile Transactions Zambia Limited (MTZL) in its Rural Community Individual Transaction Accounts and Payment Accounts in rural Zambia.

The overall objective of the project is as follows:

Small scale cotton farmers in Zambia improve their livelihoods using the Mobile Transactions Payment Services and MaKwacha Account Transaction services facilitated by Mobile Transaction Agents.

To this end, MTZL has been working with Dunavant Zambia Limited to provide improved payment and transaction services to their 70,000 outgrowing cotton farmers.

Dunavant’s outgrower management system was initially developed by MTZL and is currently in use as their core agricultural management system. Within one agricultural season, the Dunavant outgrower system moved from decentralised Microsoft Access databases at each of their nine agricultural offices to a centralised web based platform hosted within their Geneva head office.

Now, these agricultural offices and rural sheds (with laptops powered by solar charged car batteries that can connect to the internet via mobile GPRS modems) can capture real time data into a centralised system.

In 2009, MTZL and Dunavant began to develop a system that interfaces with the outgrower management system to pay farmers electronically. At the end of the 2009 buying season (September to December), a trial was done with payments made to Dunavant’s distributors.

During the 2010 buying season, an MTZL team was dedicated to developing a scalable implementation model in Katete to find ways to pay Dunavant’s farmers faster using this payment system.

This report summarizes the work that was done in 2010 and describes some of the highlights.

2. Project Summary

MTZL’s farmer payment system has one overall objective: To pay farmers faster. Dunavant’s current cotton buying process is a manual one and takes a great deal of time to turn around. This process was expedited when lap-tops that are connected to Dunavant’s central database were introduced in the field, allowing farmers to be paid in as little as three days. However, this is still far too long for most farmers to wait, for reasons that are described below. In a competitive season, farmers can be tempted to sell to other companies that offer on-the-spot payment.

Thus, Dunavant’s goal is to simply pay farmers faster. MTZL’s system offers two of doing this:

MTZL built an online payment interface that can be accessed using a mobile phone and that allows Dunavant’s paymasters to pay farmers in less than one day. Since most farmers do not have phones themselves, this is an excellent payment option. And for Dunavant, it decreases the chance for fraud.
MTZL also built a payment system that allows farmers with mobile phones to be paid into their MaKwacha Account the instant their Crop Receipt Voucher (CRV) is processed. Dunavant believes this is the future of farmer payment and that it benefits both the company and the farmer greatly.

These two payment options are contrasted to the current, manual process in the diagram below.

During the 2010 buying season, the MTZL team trained 6 sheds in Katete, 2 in Chipata, and an MTZL Agent in Monze to offer the online payment option. Trial payments were also made in all these locations. The system offers a drastically different way to pay farmers, thus a great deal of time and effort was spent on adapting the system for specific field realities and in communicating the change to Dunavant’s field staff. As the system is scaled up, this will remain an important part of the process.

In developing a model to implement this new system, we learned several things:

1. The process and system should be ready earlier in the year, as during the buying season (April to August), Dunavant staff and farmers are incredibly busy.

2. The field-based accountants require a great deal of technical support in adopting the new system thus resources should be allocated to this during scale-up.

3. The main lag in time is in collecting the CRV’s from the buyers and verifying them at the shed. During the 2010 season, many Shed Area Managers (SAMs) spent a great deal of time on this. Since they are responsible for other duties as well, it may be wise to develop an alternative method for collection.

4. The more competitive the area, the harder it is to adopt this system. People have less time to learn how to use a new system when there is cotton that needs to be bought and transported. In less competitive areas like Monze, the payment system was easy to use and staff were quick to learn. In either case, the earlier staff gets training, the better.

5. Farmers are understandably mistrustful of new companies and need time

to build trust with the system. They already have a great deal of trust with Dunavant, so it was important to make sure Dunavant was at the fore and that MTZL was seen as a partner and service provider. “Dunavant Pays Farmers Fast…Powered by Mobile Transactions.”

6. In future, as described in the diagram above, it would be best if Dunavant’s buyers are made into "MaKwacha Buyers" that can use phones to pre-process payments before the CRV's are verified.

The field team also trained and advertized to several hundred farmers and other people in Katete, Chipata, and Monze. MTZL’s overall presence in rural Zambia is quite low, making the overall knowledge and trust of MTZL small as well; however, our brand credibility is spreading by word of mouth. Many people are testing the system right now by buying talk time and depositing K100,000 (£14)into MaKwacha Accounts and withdrawing small amounts to make sure it works properly.

MTZL Agents connect the end users – the farmers – to the system we’ve described above. In developing an implementation model in Katete, we learned that there is a need for three kinds of Agents:

The Champion Agent – the Champion Agent is a franchised operator of MTZL and offers all of MTZL’s products and services. By working directly with Dunavant, the champaion becomes a guaranteed point of service for Dunavant’s farmers and casual workers for withdrawing or depositing money from and to their MaKwacha Accounts.

Sheds as Agents – Dunavant’s sheds are distributed deep in Zambia’s rural areas and can reach customers than no other Agent can. Therefore, the team trained the SAMs – who essentially manage the business – and stocks clerks at each shed in Katete and Chipata to act as MTZL Agents. Now, eight sheds are successfully operating as Agents, four in Katete region and four in Chipata region.

The SAMs are willing and proud the support the sheds as Agents because they feel it increases face time with their farmers, builds “field presence”, relationships and trust, and does not pose a hindrance to their work.

At the sheds, farmers have a reliable way to save money (instead of buying animals as savings) for essential farming costs (e.g., planting and weeding). Farmers, and not just Dunavant’s, are also coming into sheds to receive money (before the marketing season) and send it (during the marketing season).

3. Schools and Co-operatives – The field team’s first objective in setting up Agents was to “follow the money”, to see where and what farmers spend their money on. There were two overwhelming responses: Farmers spend money on school fees and fertilizers.

Accordingly, the team approached schools in Katete to see if they would receive payment using MTZL’s system and offer other products and services as an Agent. The team set up 3 schools as Agnets, two in Katete and one in Msoro.

The remotest boarding school is now a high performing Agent. Boarding schools, especially remote ones, have the biggest incentive to be Agents and the most resources making them the best Agents.

The team also approached several local farmers‘ co-operatives, as farmers are able to access subsidized fertilizer through membership in them. Co-operatives use the Agents to deposit money into their bank account. The season for fertilizer purchases has not yet come, but we are keen to see how this will pan out.

As it stands now, engaging schools and co-operatives to offer MTZL’s services allows both MTZL and Dunavant to build relationships with farmers, which is an invaluable asset in Zambia. It also is a great way to attract other rural customers for MTZL because these are institutions which people can trust.

3. Highlights

A farmer in Msoro used to ride his bike 6-8hrs round trip to pay his school fees, but now he can just send them from Dunavant’s Msoro shed. Boniface Mwale used to travel to Petauke to pay his K150,000 (£20) school fees, spending K150,000 on transport along the way, but now he can send money to his child for a K8,000 (£1) fee.

Charity Tembo (Below) is not with Dunavant but still deposited k900,000 (£120) into a MaKwacha account for safekeeping after selling a bull. She withdrew half to buy a calf and pay school fees 3 months later. Ganizani Chilumbu (left) is a 22 year old farmer/buyer who is using his MaKwacha account to save for his future.

In July 2010, Bernice Leppard (left)) and Pamela Batty (Right) of NEXT Retail Limited visited the project.

Making IT happen

2010-11-24T03:55:00.000-08:00

Before I start let me introduce myself. My name is Brett Magrath and I am one of the co-founders of Mobile Transactions. Today my position is Chief Technology Officer as well as being part of the senior management team focused on the strategic direction of the business and general management. As the last member of the senior management team to post a blog the pressure is definitely on and hopefully I can provide some interesting insights into what is definitely an interesting industry.

Within this blog I am going to provide some thoughts into the following:

M-Pesa – The industry leader causing a confusing theoretical standard
So where did our strategy and IT approach come from
Find a source and follow it…as many times as possible
Where to from here

M-PESA: THE INDUSTRY LEADER CAUSING A CONFUSING THEORETICAL STANDARD

The question around how do you compare to M-Pesa always comes up and therefore I thought before jumping into too much around Mobile Transactions that there would be value in making a few comments on M-Pesa. Firstly, the success of M-Pesa has been amazing and I am in awe of what has been achieved. This said before anyone considers trying to “copy” M-Pesa or believe that their strategy should be the industry standard it is important to assess some of the reasons for the M-Pesa success.

There a probably a million articles on this on the web and the below certainly does not catch them all, but my opinion is that the below are the key components:

The Kenyan people
Full buy-in from senior management
Understanding that mobile money is a service rather then a product
A strong and trusted brand
The market share of Safaricom
Initial donor support
Management team

These dynamics make for a challenging or near impossible industry standard to try and replicate.

Having been educated in South Africa, rugby is in my blood and I love watching rugby and any sport for that matter. The reality though is that my playing days are long gone and I have settled in nicely to the world of the armchair critic. As an industry mobile money is still very young. The potential mobile money has in terms of social and economic returns are great, but one down side of this is it has lead to a large number of very inexperienced purely theoretical based armchair critics.

My concern is that this combination of the massive success of M-Pesa with the large number of theorists commenting or driving the industry direction is leading to a situation where much of the most creative and real value added services are not being focused on as many people have been brainwashed into believing the only route to success in mobile money is following or trying to be an M-Pesa.

As more and more solutions and models are implemented and more in field knowledge of different models come to life this mindset with start to shift. The challenge will be for those supporting or investing in this space and companies like Mobile Transactions who are involved in implementing services to always reference the successes achieved in other markets, but to focus on building strategies and business plans applicable to what their markets are telling them.

From the Mobile Transactions perspective our views on this remain as they have from day one. Don’t over complicate the strategy, listen to the market, understand the needs of the market and build solutions that meet these needs, then listen and learn some more to evolve and improve our product offering and importantly make sure it is the correct offering. The approach has always been a simple one and one you can only learn from implementation. I would strongly recommend any company looking to launch within this sector to understand what M-Pesa has achieved, but to build a model that is based on market requirements not the M-Pesa effect.

SO WHERE DID THE STRATEGY AND IT APPROACH COME FROM

BANGLADESH NOVEMBER 2004

My original experiences in mobile money started in Bangladesh in November 2004. At the time we were involved in a project to implement a SMS based electronic airtime distribution system. We had implemented the system in a few African markets and through a connection to Telekom Malaysia via Telekom Networks

Malawi we ended up doing a deal with Aktel a mobile network in Bangladesh. The characteristics of the African airtime market were characterised by a network, a super dealer, a sub dealer and then the client. The difference in

In essence we build a money transfer service where the sole purpose of the solution was to sell airtime. The main take out of this for me was the amazing potential a market like Bangladesh has. Within a few months the system was processing 500,000 airtime sales per day.

ZAMBIA PILOT JULY 2007

From Bangladesh it was back to Zambia where we were approached by PROFIT a USAID funded organisation to implement an electronic payment system to pay rural cotton farmers in July 2007. Instead of spending time and effort trying to build a system to do this we utilised the same SMS based airtime system from Bangladesh. Yes SMS is not overly secure, but for a pilot in the far Eastern parts of Zambia it worked perfectly and provided a bunch of insights in terms of where we needed to take our technology and the kinds of services we needed to offer. Some of the key findings were linked to providing the ability for Money Transfers whereby employees working in the areas near the ginneries were able to transfer funds to their family back home. Based on this we developed our money transfer service which has growth successfully since the commercial launch last year. Other developments obviously included moving away from unsecured SMS to now offer a Mobile and PC based Internet interface, Java mobile application and soon to be implemented USSD interface.

COMMERCIAL LAUNCH MARCH 2009

Based on the success of the pilot and the progress being made with the Money Transfer service PROFIT again approached Mobile Transactions with the dynamic of the Zambian fertilizer support programme. This is an existing government programme that distributes fertilizer support to rural farmers. Again the IT approach was driven by a business / market requirement and the solution to how best to support this is what has today become our successful voucher solution. Any IT solution we provide we try to make it as generic as possible to support multiple industries and multiple uses. With the voucher product we achieved this and we were able to very quickly launch a slightly adjusted version of the fertilizer solution for the World Food Programme. Last month we handled nearly 40k vouchers and transacted over $1.4m dollars in value.

To summarise our IT approach to date it has been built on the following foundations:

Listen to the market and develop solutions to requirements
Solutions win the day not technology – don’t over engineer the solution or put too much effort into the solution until you know it is the correct one
There must be an IT vision for scalability, but vital this is always kept in check with the realities of what is happening on the ground and relevant to the market

FIND THE SOURCE AND FOLLOW IT…AS MANY TIMES AS POSSIBLE

MONEY TRANSFERS

Core to the success of any mobile money business is getting electronic funds into the system.

For M-Pesa this source is agents putting cash into electronic and then individual customers doing cash deposits to get this electronic and then transacting off this. For Mobile Transactions when we launched our core product was our agent to agent money transfer service. The source was similar to M-Pesa in that it first came from the agents, was transferred to the money transfer then moved to the agent who did a send to bank and the electronic was gone.

There were a few issues with this:

Getting the source from the agents is difficult – For a new company providing a new service to get agents to put funds into a product that is not their core business is a challenge and although something we achieved it took a lot more time and effort then we imagined. I think even for networks they will find this more of a challenge then they expect.
Once we had created this the product we were offering meant the source came in was transacted as a money transfer and then quickly moved out.
Because the source came from the agents the working capital amount of this source was not sufficient to add additional transactions and products to this amount
The source was a value added service to the agent so the amount of working capital they invested was always competing against the working capital the agents invested in their core business offering

VOUCHERS

Once our voucher system was launched we were able to create a new source. This time it came from the voucher project companies who put in funds to distribute vouchers. The dynamics of this electronic source was very different:

The electronic put into the system was towards their core business or strategy or distributing vouchers
The source was being used to add real value to this core business
The working capital of this source was enough to look to start to add new products that transacted of the original electronic source therefore increasing the number of times we could transact on the source
The voucher source created a pool of electronic at our agents through the agents selling products that were core to their business

BULK PAYMENTS

What was also interesting is our next product we launched was our bulk payment solution whereby companies could pay both banked and unbanked customers via our system. I am going to focus this discussion on the banked side rather then the unbanked as they has different dynamics. On the banked side there is a market inefficiency whereby cross bank transactions are very expensive and our strategy was to offer a lower cost bank payment solution to any bank at one lower rate whereby we then switch between the different banks. Logical yes, but the issue is we needed to create a new source of electronic. Referencing the points above we were trying to create a new source that did not add real value to the companies core business and the real benefit was a cost saving. As we have taken the product to market we have learnt similar lessons to our money transfer product in that getting this source into the system is often more of a challenge then expected. And again once the source is in if it is used for banked payments is departs very quickly. Again similar to our agent to agent money transfers service. Like money transfers I am fully confident that our bulk payment product will turn the corner and achieve the growth we have seen in our other products, but the error we made was focusing on a new source rather then following an existing source.

ORDERING

So with lessons learnt about following the source in early December we will be launching our latest product called our ordering system. The beauty of this product is we are not creating an electronic source as it already exists. Our voucher agents have electronic funds and they have a need for an improved and more efficient ordering process from suppliers. The suppliers too have a need for a more efficient ordering system meaning we are offering a product that adds real value to the company’s core business and we are following the source of the electronic funds we are creating and facilitating multiple transactions off the original source.

What will be interesting to follow is that as we get this electronic to move from the agent to the supplier will our bulk payment solution become more desirable once we have overcome the core challenge of getting in the electronic source.

WHERE TO FROM HERE

In any new industry to make any widespread comments about where Mobile Transactions will go is a bit of an unknown.

What I can say is that the direction will we go will be focussed on a few keys areas:

Listening to our customers and markets and taking our solutions towards the direction the feedback we get wants to take us
As we grow as an organisation be in the more privileged position where we can start to analysis the directions we are drawn into to determine which are the best routes for our company

The other component I would add into this is that although the current strategy focuses on following the source and transacting off this I believe future strategies will evolve that focus on analysing the data that we are obtaining. I don’t understand the Micro Finance sector, but I find it fascinating how an industry can boasts about a +97% repayment on loans when the interest rates they are charging are so high. I understand there are large costs involved, what I don’t understand is why they are needed. Is it a lack of financial transaction knowledge of the customers to make sound lending decisions or is it a lack of a low cost payment and repayment solution. As highlighted this lending space is a big unknown to me, but something I look forward to applying my mind to in the future but I guess if I fall back on what I have written in this blog only when the market pulls me into this direction.

The four pillars of a great organisation

2010-11-07T05:37:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

The reality of starting a business from scratch is that at the beginning, you don't really know what will work. So you try a whole bunch of things and follow the traction. We launched as a money transfer business, chasing the dream of M-Pesa's success in Kenya. In 18 months, we have grown our money transfer business to over $600,000 turnover per month. To achieve this growth, we quickly learned that we had to become an agent business, and we now manage a network of over 220 agents in every region of Zambia. And to lock-in this agent network, we became an electronic voucher business, with our agents redeeming over 56,000 agriculture and food vouchers worth over $1,000,000 in October alone.

For an organisation to scale, it must have strong foundations. Below are the four pillars that are transforming Mobile Transactions from a good idea to a GREAT organisation:

1. Focus

As a business matures, it must constantly refocus its scarce resources for growth to accelerate. This is no easy feat, especially for a start-up business like ours that is building a new industry from the ground up.

Our focus is on increasing transaction volume. This means two things: a) capturing more value on our system by locking-in existing and new strategic customers in our sales pipeline, and b) growing the overall liquidity of our agent network. We have created two separate teams tasked with these objectives with clear KPIs to measure their progress.

2. Alignment

Alignment means orienting every single staff member in a common direction where every individual is adding value. This must start at the most senior level, and then filter downwards with buy-in at all levels.

We recently took our entire management team away on an off-site retreat to get everyone on the same page. The first day was limited to Brad, Brett, Keith, and I getting aligned on high-level strategy as Senior Management. The rest of the management team came the next day and we had two very productive days mixed with fun and work. We went through a process of redefining roles and responsibilities in a new organisational structure, identifying quick wins and game changing new deals to go after, and revisiting our guiding principles. Perhaps most importantly, we created shared stories and experiences that have re-energized everyone to push forward during these critical next few months.

3. Ownership

Businesses are only as good as the people who work in them, and good people must be enabled to succeed. We are very fortunate to have an excellent management team who are all 100% committed to achieving our vision of a cashless Africa.

One outcome of our retreat is to create cost and profit centres that will give our managers the ability to run their own units as if they were business owners. Managers of these centres will have real decision making power over who is on their team and how best to manage them to achieve measurable results. This new structure will need to be matched by each individual stepping up and taking full ownership over his or her role.

4. Accountability

Accountability is the feedback loop that ensures what is agreed is implemented to the best of our ability. Without accountability for both individual and team performance, the above three pillars are significantly weakened and we will not become the great organisation we all want to be.

We made a big step in creating a culture of accountability by bringing Keith in as our Chief Operations Officer. The first think Keith did was set deadlines for managers to present their quarterly budget and KPIs, which their performance will be measured against. He sent a strong message that there is no excuse for missing deadlines, and that we should all embrace this culture as it is the fastest way to accelerate both our business growth and individual careers.

Keith and I have divided responsibilities around these four pillars. My job as CEO is to keep our business focused on what's important, and ensuring everyone is aligned around our overall strategy. Keith is responsible for creating the right conditions for everyone to take ownership over their roles, and for holding each individual accountable for performance.

If we can continue this progress, I have no doubt we will be successful and one day make that infamous transition from "good to GREAT".

Best,

Mike

What attracted me to Mobile Transactions

2010-10-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

At the time of writing, I have been with Mobile Transactions for almost two weeks. So much has happened in this short time. I considered writing about my early experiences in this exciting company. But it has all gone by in such a blur and it is too early for me to put my thoughts in a coherent way. So instead I decided to write about why I made the decision to leave the cosiness of the corporate world for a young, growing company.The obvious question many people have asked me is why would I give that all up, pack up my life and join an early stage company? I can answer that question very easily with any of the standard clichés (which all happen to be true by the way):

· “I was looking for an exciting new challenge”

· “I wanted to get away from the politics and bureaucracy of a corporate”

· “I was bored of being pigeon-holed in a single function and wanted the variety that comes with being in a young business”

· “I was sick of having an anti-septic, throttling corporate culture imposed on me and wanted to be part of building something different”

· “I wanted to be able to wear jeans to work”

I could go on and on. But that is only the first part of the answer and is the far less interesting part. What is more pertinent is why Mobile Transactions? What is it about Mobile Transactions that made it stand out amongst all the other possibilities I was considering?

The easiest way I can explain it is by telling the story of how it came to be.

Mike (CEO) and I met whilst studying at Oxford a couple of years ago. He immediately struck me as a highly intelligent man with great integrity. Our friendship grew through what turned out to be an amazing year. He came to visit me in Johannesburg during the soccer World Cup in South Africa. One evening, we were out for dinner with his lovely wife Isabelle. I was ranting (as is my wont) about my frustration with all the points mentioned in bullets above (and a few others I have no doubt). When eventually I stopped my self-indulgent diatribe, I asked him more about what he was doing. When he told me he was helping to run an exciting new mobile transactions business, my immediate thought was: “oh no, not another one”. For several months up to that point I had been leading a team investigating the possibility of opening a retail presence in Africa for the bank I was working for. A key part of this investigation was whether we could use mobile to deliver our strategy. I had been to several conferences and presentations on the topic. Although the promise mobile banking held was palpable, nothing I had seen got me particularly excited.

In an effort to be polite, I asked him more about it. During his enthusiastic description, my scepticism slowly changed to interest and ultimately to an incredible sense that I was at last hearing something different. The subtle tweak in the way in which Mobile Transactions was approaching this market all of a sudden made so much sense. (Feedback from Mike on his recent whirlwind trip the UK and USA indicates that scepticism, evolving to gradual awakening, culminating in that Aha! moment is a common reaction from people who hear about the business for the first time.)

With an increasingly affluent and growing population almost the size of India’s, the consumer opportunity in Africa is huge. But consumers are too heterogeneous and too widely dispersed across too many borders to be viewed as a single market. Contrary to what many people think, this is not the United States of Africa! What is common and spans borders however is Africa’s continued reliance on foreign flows (remittances, donor funding/NGO’s, micro-financing, multinational corporatesetc) and the massive role of the State within these economies. Fail to understand that, and you fail to understand Africa as it stands. Mobile Transactions acknowledges this and has set about trying to capture the consumer opportunity by first trying to capture the institutions for which the vast majority of consumers rely on in their day-to-day lives. That is the Aha!of Mobile Transactions to me and what sets them apart from all the other companies clambering for a piece of this very big, meaty pie.

Joining a business you wholeheartedly believe in comes with an increased responsibility to help make sure you do your bit to ensure it reaches its potential. Our recent good results are proof of how Mike, Brad, Brett and the rest of the team have the ability to make the business grow as fast as it can. But all great businesses are built on complimentary skills. So for the time being, I see my role as ensuring that while we grow as fast as we can, we also grow as slowly as we need to. Making sure the right processes, structures and systems are in place to de-risk the business to allow us to grow our markets and products in a controlled and deliberate way. This I hope will allow the rest of the team to focus on what they’re good at without worrying about being capsized by an internal or external black swan that inevitably comes from growing too quickly.

My concluding remarks are aimed at Mobile Transactions employees.

Upon leaving the aforementioned bank a couple of months ago, the consistently predictable counter-offer followed soon thereafter. I was offered the position of heading up what will become a retail presence in Africa for the bank. Whilst the offer was interesting (more for the timing than its substance), I didn’t consider it for longer than it took for me to explain to them that the place I am going to will be part of making theestablished financial model redundant. Our continued success in this space will render the incumbents that fail to adapt irrelevant. Why would I take a horse and cart into battle when there is an armoured tank in the garage?

Through our platform, we have the unique opportunity to change the transactional landscape forever in a very real and significant way. The best part of all this, is that we get to do all this whilst making a positive difference to the lives of the people who most need it. As employees of Mobile Transactions, we need to cherish that privilege and feel the weight of responsibility to ensure that it is nurtured. This is big stuff!

I thoroughly look forward to meeting the rest of the team in Zambia when I head up from Cape Town in a few days.

Passing the Torch (and trying hard to let go of the reins...)

2010-09-29T01:02:00.000-07:00

Hi my name is Brad Magrath, and I am one of the founder shareholders of Mobile Transactions with my brother Brett. This is my first blog ever anywhere so I thought I would share some of my thoughts and experiences that every entrepreneur will probably go through as they ramp and scale their business: bringing in and retaining new skilled people, and empowering and trusting them to take the business to new heights.

Having two teenage daughters of my own I certainly relate to this story as told to be by a mate: When his daughter was 22 she was reversing out of his drive way in her new car and she crashed into the gate. She jumped out the car in tears and distraught and ran towards him. He opened his arms to console her when she ran straight into her boyfriend (now husband) arms. He just stood there in shock and still is not sure who was more upset – him or his daughter. I guess the moral is everyone has a time and place of influence and time stands still for no one. As a founder of a business getting your head around bringing in new managers to manage yourbusiness, is certainly an interesting and challenging concept.

Entrepreneurs by their very nature are passionate and committed. Certainly my brother and I have always been very passionate about Mobile Transactions. Similar to the cartoon TV show “Pinky and the Brain” who are lab rats who wake every day with one mission: World Domination, we wanted to create an awesome business and one that would scale across Africa. An early concern was how we would create a culture and organization that could get and keep the very best people. The nature of our business: Mobile Payments has both commercial and social impacts, has in many ways allowed us to be able to successfully do that. No mean feat having our first operations in Lusaka, Zambia – not a hot bed of world best recruiting talent.

As a company we have transitioned in highly skilled, qualified and experienced new staff: CEO, CFO as well as over 5 senior management staff and as founders we have realigned our roles as part of this team. Was it easy, absolutely not. Could it have been easier, I am not sure. In many ways we did a lot of things right and we actively sought to bring in the new skills but the reality is as strong willed individuals in an emotional hot bed even with the best intentions you can expect fireworks and we certainly had them. As we went through the mincer we certainly had some blood on the meeting room table, most of it constructive conflict but at times just conflict. In hindsight being brutally honest with myself I probably had visions of being a benevolent dictator: a democracy when I say so. Equally new management I am sure would equally face up to mistakes made during this time.

Some of the outcomes of this process we took on have been a far more focused, accountable and productive team. Incidentally over the 9 months we have been in this process the business has grown over 950% with platform revenue in September 2010 of over $2 million for that month.

Pretty staggering growth and born mostly out of this transition – I guess a great product helps but getting the skills and management to drive the business was fundamental.

Having outlined some of the issues, I think the following points contributed us going through this and coming out a stronger performing business with more capacity to scale. Again these are just lessons we learnt so take then with a pinch of salt when reviewing other businesses.

Trust, integrity, egos at the door

Even when heads were clashing there was an absolute trust in the integrity of all players round the table, and that differences aside everyone had the business best interest at heart. Also nearly every manager has filled numerous positions and job roles as required.

When things are not yet aligned this is a key factor

History

Coming from a team sport background you always get an understanding of the person next to you once you have won and lost together. It tells you a lot about them. I can remember Mike, now our CEO and fully fledged partner taking Brett and I out for a first strategic meeting (with us maintaining we were too busy for it) and then sitting there, arms folded behind my head thinking: OK, Mr. Oxford MBA what have you got to teach me. Needless to say we have come a long way a year down the track and have history to fall back.

Understanding Cultures

With a management team that has consisted of people from Zambia, South Africa, Canada, USA, UK, India, Polish and now we are adding Kenya and Nigeria it took us awhile to get to grips with the dynamics. We are not there yet but there is certainly more understanding - if the United Nations ever need help we can add some insights.

Alignment

Make a plan and get things done. As a start up that has to be a call to arms and we have adopted it. It does mean feet get stamped on and ego’s bruised but it is critical that while defined roles and responsibilities are important and have value, sometimes stuff just has to get done and the closest person is often the best.

Ownership

Mistakes happen, deal with it. Make a plan. There is no value in yes men or people who think just like you.

The first time I did not get my way, and I guess even now when I do not, the person standing in my way had best be able to stand their ground. This business means a lot to me and I certainly start every discussion thinking I am right. We have been fortunate to have solid individuals and professionals who have backed themselves and their role in the business. You just do not need to know everything that is happening every day.

This might sound incredibly obvious but for nearly two years we had two employees, the other one being family. Fast forward to this agriculture voucher season and Hans joining the team and working with Graham, employing 14 new short term staff, creating plans and budgets and then most important implementing an awesome project that generates over 50 new agents and $1.6 million revenue with little or no input from you, and certainly no control of the process by you. I have needed at times to remind myself to step back and not jump in. Trust their and Mike's judgement and focus on my job: selling. Once you get your head around it and just let go, it makes a difference.

Pig and Chicken

An oft quoted role in our business is that when you sit and have bacon and eggs for breakfast – the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. We like people in Mobile Transactions to be able to say “oink “. Certainly staff at all levels have put in sweat and long hours to show commitment. As a company we have started to roll out share options, cash incentives at a senior level and moving to the 2011 we will be extending various incentive plans across our staff network. Commitment works both ways.

Manage by numbers

If an entrepreneur does read this then this is the only paragraph of the whole thing worth remembering. Once we recruited Dave as our CFO and he got on top of the numbers and we identified our key value drivers and he was able to give us weekly up to date dashboards of our financial metrics around these same drivers: bam. Every dynamic around the team changed. Meetings stopped being about opinions, and who could voice their opinion loudest or longest but became fact based. The numbers were there and they were indisputable – everything started to flow and decision making was easier and lots of bottlenecks removed. If you want to make changes like these get on top of your real value drivers and measure them to the nth degree.

Celebrate victories

Something we have not yet got right, but when you are in dog fight you cannot celebrate false dawns but saying that we work hard, are making progress but seem not to take stock of the wins. The reality is this team has grown nearly 1,000 % in 9 months. It is normally only when you tell people our story that you take a moment to reflect on the progress. I think we also know what mistakes we make and how we could have done things so much better

Next Steps

As a senior team, led by Mike we are aware of some key challenges we will need to address going forward.

We are confident that this is the team that can scale regionally but are also aware that as and when we grow each and every senior person has no claim to a chair and as we grow and attract potential new investors change dynamics at all levels of the company remain possible.

More importantly in the short term we have some key management positions that are at key points in their careers. We will go to the plate to keep them but these are not done deals in any way.

To date we have not yet shown an ability to advance our Zambian staff up through the ranks. We have identified our Next Generation of Zambian Managers Claudius, Memory, Teddy, Charles and Agents like Michael and Thersford and others will be given opportunities but it is an important that both they and us as a company step up to get them to a level they have shown glimpses of but not yet achieved.

We are also setting up an independent and professional advisory board. It is important we know what we do not know and where we are short. Corporate Governance, investor readiness etc are all good buzz words but are also things we want to engrain in our culture through good advisors, while remembering that these can be implemented and in no way dilute our work culture and need to remain a cutting edge start up.

Conclusion

Well I have rambled on for 4 pages so if anyone has managed to wade through the whole thing I finish with what I said to Mike, our CEO on his handover. We got the business to $ 4 million; you and the team have to take it to $ 40 million. I look forward to supporting him every step of the way.

Best,

Brad

MaKwacha Champion Agents on the Copperbelt!

2010-09-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

My name is Teddy Sampa, I am the Deputy Agent Manager for Mobile Transactions.

Last week we toured Kitwe and Ndola to see how the Makwacha Champion Agent network is coming up. Makwacha Champion Agents are men and women who have been contacted by Mobile Transactions to run franchised shops called Champion Agent Shops. At the moment Mobile Transactions

has eight Champion agent shops; two on the Copperbelt, one in Livingstone, two in Eastern Province, two in Lusaka and one in Mongu.

I would say we were very pleased to see the way branding is coming up for both Makwacha Champion Agent shops. My prayer is that once the shops are fully branded we will see more people sending money through the Makwacha Champion Agents in Ndola and Kitwe. At the moment both shops pay out more money than they send out.

In the picture, left to right is the Agent Manager Graham Lettener, followed by Sandra Jere and Sarah Lungu in Kitwe Champion Agent shop. Below is a picture for Ndola Champion Agent shop.

We are expecting to do the first Loan disbursement for Harmos in Kitwe probably the 1^st week of October 2010. And Kitwe being a big town, we are looking at having the same number of Loan disbursements for Kitwe as in Lusaka as time goes on.

A daily cash recon tool in excel format has been introduced to both Makwacha Champion Agents. This will help Sandra a Makwacha Champion Agent in Kitwe and Katongo a Makwacha Champion Agent in Ndola to reconcile their cash and electronic credit at the end of each business day. The same tool will be used to reconcile cash and electronic credit after Harmos Loan disbursements. And to make it even better Mobile Transactions Accounts have an Online statement, so using both our online statement and daily cash recon tool will even make life easier for cash recons. Therefore, I would say that, we are confident enough that all cash and electronic credit will be handled properly even if large sums of money will be handled during loan disbursements for Harmos.

Both Champion Agents have signed a new contract with Mobile Transactions to run the Champion Agent Shops as franchise business for Mobile Transactions. This week two more Champion Agents within Lusaka will be signing their new contracts as well.

I do believe that in a few months from now we are going to make a huge difference in the way payments are made on the Copperbelt just as we are making a difference in Lusaka. Its high time Copperbelt began making electronic payments to its esteemed customers and clients, and Mobile Transactions is the IDEAL SYSTEM to use.

Have a great week!

Teddy Sampa

An interview with a MaKwacha Champion Agent

2010-09-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

Agents are the heart of our business, and Michael being one of our MaKwacha Champion Agents plays a very big part of this. He started working for Mobile Transactions a year ago, and his achievements speak volumes to date. In this piece I sit with Michael and get to know him a little better.

Me: Hi Michael, am going to ask you some questions that I will later write about on our blog, so I’ll need you to come out and be as honest as you can.

Michael: I can come out anywhere and to anyone you don’t have to worry about me being shy or fake.

Me: That’s good to know, tell me
about yourself.

Michael: I am 26 years old, first born in a family of two boys, I attended Mansa secondary school during which I had to be constantly absent from class because of my mother’s illness, nevertheless I excelled in my studies and was chosen Head boy for the school. After I graduated from Secondary school, I studied Chartered Institute of Management Accounts (CIMA). I completed Level one but could not go any further due to financial constraints.

Me: You have quite a story, how did you join Mobile Transactions?

Michael: I was working for Barclays Bank at the time as a Lead Sales Generator, then my team leader Nevyson approached me and told me about a job offer and I accepted.

Me: You must have been either very unhappy or suffering from temporally insanity, why would you leave a job in a bank for another job at a company you have never even heard of?

Michael: When Nevyson told me about Mobile Transactions, he also explained how it works and I was fascinated by the technological aspect of it, especially the SMS notifications after every transaction. To me it was also about joining an organization where I could be able to influence decisions.

Me: Well and good. You started off as a Sales Generator, then were promoted to Operations Support, then to Champion in Chipata, Katete and now Lusaka, and you did exceptionally well in all the mentioned positions and the success in Chipata and Katete has been attributed to you, why do you think you did so well and how do you feel about it?

Michael: To be frank I think I did so well because of my drive to do

things quickly, am not ashamed to do any type of work as long as it is giving value to my business and the organization as a whole. To answer your question about how I feel, I feel that what I did in Chipata and Katete is just a fraction of what I was supposed to do.

Me: Wow! Let’s talk about the People at Mobile Transactions, off the top of your head, who do you admire and why?

Michael: Brad, the regional director, for his business sense and language, he can sale anything to anyone, and then there is Teddy, the Deputy Agent Manager, he has integrity and does not lie. Then there is you, the Brand Manager, your speed and wonderful spirit is admirable.

Me: Huh! Thanks I bet you mentioned cause I am the one doing the interview. How do you manage your team and why do they fondly call you Mwine Mushi (a Bemba term that means owner of a village)?

Michael: No, I mentioned you because it’s the truth I admire you. I run my team by making myself approachable, I have developed a work culture of team work with defined roles and responsibility. As for the nickname I guess its because I take ownership, you can get the answer from my assistants as they are the ones who call me by that name.

Me: I certainly will. You mentioned goals; can you share what those are?

Michael: Our goal right now as Katondo Champion store is to build enough cash float so that we can also start paying microfinance loan disbursements.

Me: Good luck on that goal, if there is someone who can achieve it, it is most certainly you. Thank you for your time I know you are extremely busy.

Michael: Thank you.

After our interview, we took a walk to his store, and yes I asked Michael’s assistant Simon why they call him owner of the village, and he simply said because he is such a great leader, no one deserves that title quite like him.

Have a productive week.

Memory.

MaKwacha Loan Disbursements with Harmos Microfinance!

2010-09-16T07:27:00.000-07:00

Hi, my name is Claudius Fundi. I am the project manager of the Harmos Micro-Enterprise Development Limited account.

Background:

Harmos Micro-Enterprise are a subsidiary of Vision Fund International a World Vision International owned micro finance organisation. They provide business loans to Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Zambia.

In April this year Harmos Micro-Enterprise Development Limited and Mobile Transactions Zambia Limited signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the provision of electronic payment solutions to facilitate bulk loan disbursements to their unbanked and banked borrowers, and for the provision of a loan repayment module through the Mobile Transactions MaKwacha Agent network.

Pilot Project:

Since this was a new avenue that Mobile Transactions had ventured into and in accordance with the company’s 1-5-All policy (where we start with a localized pilot project and quickly expand to the whole project compass as implementation succeeds), we piloted with Lusaka Banked Disbursements in April this year. Within a month the project matured to banked disbursement to the whole country.

Unbanked Disbursements:

In August 2010 after a review of the project both parties agreed that the time was ripe to expand to unbanked payments, first for Lusaka and quickly expand to the rest of the country. These are mainly Group Loans of about 7 people in a group and an average amount of K1,000,000 ($200) each. Group Loans constitute 80% of Harmos loan disbursements.

The Lusaka implementation was launched on a shaky note on. The borrowers are mostly people who have never had a bank account in their lives and shared only one or two phones in the group. Harmos Credit Officers are at pains to hammer the new concept into the minds of their clients. The borrowers usually do not understand how their loans could get paid into a ‘mobile phone’.

When the initial beneficiaries went to collect their payments from the designated Champion Agent-Tresphord Mwango, in most cases it transpired that they had deleted the text messages that designated their users names. This made the activation of their MaKwacha accounts difficult and as such Tresphord had to refer them to the Mobile Transactions office for resolution of this problem. The other challenge was that once the beneficiaries received notifications of payments by phone text, all the groups would go at the same time to demand for payment from Tresphord’s. At one time this was up to 10 groups. Time is also not observed. Most times groups come late in the afternoon after 16:00 hours. In other cases we have had people turning up for payment upon receipt of text messages informing them of the creation of their MaKwacha accounts only but without payments being made to them yet.

The demand on Tresphord was overwhelming with the crowds of loan beneficiaries almost choking out the other customers sending and receiving money transfers. But Tresphord being the excellent manager that he is has managed this very well.

A total of 200 unbanked loans with the value of $40,000 have been paid through Mobile Transactions since and our capacity to cover them efficiently is increasing by the day. With the collaboration of Graham Lettner, our Agent Manager, and his team the process in Lusaka has improved with more agents taking on the payment of these beneficiaries.

Our target is cover Copperbelt unbanked disbursement in the next couple of weeks and there after quickly expand to Southern Province and then the rest of the country.

Cheers,

Claudius

CEO Update - Wednesday September 15

2010-09-15T02:15:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

We have our August numbers in and it was another month of growth. Key highlights include:

We processed nearly $1.8 million in transaction value through our system. This is a 583% increase since January.

Our system processed a total of 42,886 transactions, a 441% increase since January.

Voucher transactions for August broke through the 20,000 barrier for the first time. We are targeting over 28,000 voucher redemptions for September with WFP, CFU, and FAO leading the charge.

We paid out nearly $40,000 in unbanked microfinance loans and casual worker payments.

In June, July, and August, we processed over 9,000 system payments to Dunavant Farmers worth $1 million.

Finally, August finished off with the founder shareholders, CAD, investing $75,000 cash into the business.

The focus in September is Traction Traction Traction. We have aggressive growth targets, and we want to quickly scale our banked and unbanked payment products to complement vouchers and money transfers. We've had a couple months to test these in the market, and we will now switch to selling and implementation. Brad will focus on Corporate, SME, and Government sector sales, while I will target the development and microfinance sectors. In addition:

We are launching both banked and unbanked payments for the Zambia Emory HIV Research Project (ZEHRP). We anticipate processing in excess of 500 payments per month for ZEHRP at full capacity.

We are hiring 3 new IT development resources in Cape Town to beef our our capacity and meet client demand. Focus areas will be on current contracted work for our existing clients, followed by a new agent cash reconciliation tool and other product enhancements.

Brad will be travelling to the US to speak about our electronic voucher product at a conference hosted by Catholic Relief Services, one of the largest NGOs in the world.

Expect September to be another busy and fruitful month. We've got a big challenge ahead of us but I am confident that the Mobile Transactions team is up for it.

Best,

Mike

CEO Update - Monday August 30

2010-08-30T01:13:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

Mobile Transactions had another week of progress and of course a few challenges.

We successfully disbursed 78 Harmos microfinance loans through our Lusaka champion agents. Harmos is an MFI that was set up as part of World Vision's "Vision Fund" and was Mobile Transactions' first MFI partner. We are ramping up with them to process all of their Lusaka disbursements this week and then rolling out to the Copperbelt and Southern Province. We are also targeting September to launch loan repayments through our agent network.

We processed 269 Dunavant salary payments to their banked employees. We are now processing Dunavant's entire banked payroll country wide except for the Eastern Province, and expect to achievethat milestone in September.

Vouchers also had their best week ever, with 6,964 redemptions. This is related to more efficient voucher distributions from WFP implementing partners. The Conservation Farming Unit (CFU) came online with voucher redemptions thanks to Hans' hard work, and we are targeting a September 10 launch date for Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) input vouchers.

Both Mobile Transactions and our agents realised a 5% increase in gross profit after changing our money transfer pricing in July. Money transfer numbers were down last week as compared to the last, primarily due to our Lusaka champion agents running into liquidity constraints. Graham and his team are working hard to address this and have signed up some new cash wholesale agents to come online this week.

We signed up the Zambia Emory HIV Research Project (ZHERP) as a new payments customer at the end of last week. Mobile Transactions will be providing a payment solution for ZHERP's 140 banked staff and over 500 unbanked community health volunteers.

And perhaps the biggest news of all: the Bank of Zambia confirmed that we could go ahead with our MaKwacha agent brand! We had received initial approval from BOZ but then noticed Zain had changed their new mobile account flyers to the same name. Before we even notified the BOZ, they informed us that they have asked Zain to change their name to something else because we were using it first and had asked their permission. This shows the strength of our relationship with BOZ, and how constructive they have been regulating the emerging mobile payments industry in Zambia.

The challenge will now be to increase the liquidity of our agent network to support more payouts. Brad and I are focused on signing up new customers and driving transactions, while the agents and operations team led by Graham, Dave, and Teddy have their work cut out for them to keep pace! We have a strong agent value proposition and the agent team needs to roll up their sleeves and hit the pavement to bring on more, better agents, and ensure they are properly trained and managed.

Finally, Mobile Transactions was featured in the Corporate Social Responsibility report for NEXT, our key partner on the Dunavant project in the East. You can read about us by clicking the link below and downloading the report (see page 17).

http://www.nextplc.co.uk/nextplc/corporateresponsibility/corprespreport/

I wish everyone a focused, productive week.

Best,

Mike

Mobile Transactions pays Dunavant casual workers!

2010-08-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

Here's an update from our Champion Agent in the East, Michael Sakala:

Mobile Transactions has been proved the fastest way of getting paid by casual workers for Dunavant in Katete.

This follows the payment made to them on the 18/08/2010 of which the actual payment reflecting on Dunavant calendar is 21/08/2010; however they started receiving liquid cash today as early as 9:50hrs, as we waited for correcting of numbers which were mixed up yesterday.

So far eighteen (18) have been paid out of twenty six (26) meaning we only have eight (8) people remaining to clear the entire group. Nothing so far has been a limiting factor and I’m proud to announce that I didn’t withdraw anything from Dunavant office to get this done as it was funded by high amounts of sending customers, what a coincidence.

There is no panic from casual workers when it comes to withdrawing cash as they are coming at their own pace, otherwise I would have finished them all today but it looks like some are working all day.

I’m happy to see some casual workers demonstrating confidence in our MaKwacha accounts, to cite examples Teddy Lubinda and Ryan Lungu, they only withdrew part of their pay leaving the larger portion for savings, this signifies realized value for holding a MaKwacha account.

What is so exciting is that the oil plant is not seasonal, hence we have this relationship with casual workers from the oil department as an ongoing thing unless Dunavant stops producing oil which is almost impossible. There is no need to persuade managers again to do this for the next payment, this has now been set.

I’m looking forward to see how we can expand the areas of our operations in Dunavant or rather identify another department of the same kind where we can come in as Mobile Transactions.

Thanks to everyone who is putting a hand to see this successful, am highly indebted and humbled for your works.

Thanks

Michael.

‘’You asked, so here is exactly what I think.........’’

2010-08-20T07:50:00.001-07:00

Seeing that this is my first blog on this site, it is only right that I begin by introducing myself: my name is Memory Chirwa and I’m the Agent Brand Manager of Mobile Transactions in Lusaka, Zambia. We are a company that strives to achieve its mission which is to turn Africa cashless.

We recently took part in the Agriculture and Commercial Show of Zambia, which is the country’s premier show held in the capital city, Lusaka. It runs for five days from the last Thursday in July to the first Monday of August each year. It offers a platform for regional and international cultural exchange, and exhibitors at the show have included companies from many countries so it’s a big affair for companies and families.

For five days straight, my team and I kept saying the same things over and over again to over 500 different people who visited our stand. Now as dreadful as that might sound, we were more than happy to do it,

as we all had one goal in mind which was to create awareness about our awesome services and learn as much as we could from the patrons. The amazing thing is once we asked for the general public’s opinion of our company and the services that we offer, their attitude was “You asked, so here is exactly what I think...” Out poured suggestions, questions, criticisms and lots of praise. We were told to our faces to extend the number of Champion Agents to all provincial capitals, to advertise more, and even the names of some problematic Agents. Some of the questions we were asked were, “what do you do? How can I be part of you? Why should I trust you with my money? How do you control your Agents to ensure that they are doing the right thing?

Our Chilubi Island Agent who is located in far off the beaten track received a lot of praise for being able to do transactions in such a remote area. We also got attention for our low transaction fees which attracted show goers to send money and sign up on our mobile Makwacha account. Our brand also got huge thumbs up and from all of this feedback we compiled a report that was used to come up with a lot of action plans which we are currently implementing.

The feedback was overwhelming and I believe the effect of the exhibition remains to be seen in the coming weeks. But more than anything the Agriculture Show taught me that people love to be listened to and if you just ask and give an ear, you can be amazed at what you can actually learn. Needles to say we learnt a lot.

-Memory.

CEO Update

2010-08-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

My name is Mike Quinn and I’m CEO of Mobile Transactions in Lusaka, Zambia. We are on a mission to turn Africa cashless by connecting organizations of all sizes to the mass market using mobile technology and a country-wide agent network. Our products and services cover money transfers, social cash transfers, electronic vouchers for food and agricultural subsidies, microfinance loan disbursements and repayments, and salary payments to the unbanked and unconnected.

This will be the first of a weekly CEO update I will post here on both business progress and setbacks. I look forward to following the discussion.

Mobile Transactions has continued to make progress in August, although much of the focus has been on consolidating our business in preparation for a big push to become cash flow positive on transaction revenues. We have continued to make great strides as a business, but disproportionately off the back of our system development team in Cape Town. The immediate challenge to our team in Zambia is to improve our implementation and client management, while generating new business to see us into the black.

The past week has seen the completion of three foundational pieces of work that will help us achieve this goal:

First, Natalie, Leanne, Santiago, and Simon from Oxford’s Said Business School delivered a very thorough presentation that provided an implementation framework up until the end of 2010. Their presentation focused on two parts: 1) improving operations and analysis of our agent network, and 2) launching our bulk payments product with tailored value propositions to focused market segments. They struck the right balance

between strategic insight and practical recommendations, and if we follow their plan I have no doubt we will see results.

Second, Sara, our very own “legal department” and intern from the Grassroots Business Fund finished up six weeks of helping us get “investment ready”.

Sara added huge value from day one by drafting new contracts for all of our staff, preparing standard agreements for our voucher and bulk payments products, reviewing and submitting formal comments on proposed e-money regulations from the Bank of Zambia, and doing the background work on a corporate structure. Sara was a model of what “technical assistance” can and should be – a unique skill-set combined with a fantastic attitude and an ability to roll up her sleeves and get things done.

Last, but certainly not least, Ben, a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Canada who has been living in Katete for the past 4 months, delivered a summary presentation on our farmer payment project with Dunavant. While we did not make as many payments as we planned (around 3,000), we learned many lessons that will enable us to achieve full scale in 2011. Notably, our payment system was successfully integrated into Dunavant’s outgrower system and adopted in the field, and 8 Dunavant sheds were set up as Mobile Transactions agents. We were hindered by a late start and a disappointing cotton crop, but Ben was instrumental in achieving some significant wins.

We are sad to see everyone go, but are very appreciative of the tremendous contribution they have all made to Mobile Transactions.

On the downside, we had to replace one of our Champion agents in Lusaka for performance related issues. This was disappointing for many reasons, but it is a reality in a start-up business and many lessons were learned. Graham and his agent team will be implementing improved controls and agent management structures as a result of this setback.

Looking ahead, we will be implementing a new organizational structure that will bring us more clarity and focus. Dave will take on increased responsibility in operations as his role expands to CFO / COO. He will manage Graham, Hans, and Claudius who will focus exclusively on agents, voucher projects, and NGO / microfinance payments respectively. This will free up my and Brad’s time to do what we do best – sell our products to customers and sell our business to investors.

Best,

Mike

Zambia farmers get innovative e-vouchers

2010-03-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

"We are using mobile technology to improve access to financial services, and change the way companies, NGOs [non-governmental organisations], and government work with the banked and the unbanked," Hans Hesse, e-voucher manager at the company said. "Our vision is a cashless Africa."

Read Now: http://www.afrol.com/articles/36984