Category Archives: Safaricom success

Safaricom CEO Leave and Impact

Safaricom is not expected to undergo major changes or see much impact following the shock statement released this week about CEO Bob Collymore leaving the company for a few months to undergo medical treatment.

“During this time, Sateesh Kamath, the current Chief Financial Officer for Safaricom who is also Mr. Collymore’s alternate on the Board, will take a primary role.  He will be supported by Joseph Ogutu who is the current Director – Strategy and Innovation, Safaricom. Mr. Ogutu will be responsible for Safaricom’s day-to-day operations until Mr. Collymore’s return from medical leave.”

Following the news about the CEO’s leave, the Safaricom CFO had a session with investors, and according to a Citi report afterwards on the implications of the events:

We have no concerns over operations of the company in the CEO’s absence. Based on examples in other geographies, it would take a couple of years to derail a well-run company. The company may become exposed on the regulatory side. We think the regulation is likely to remain balanced with consideration of the contribution the company makes to the state (in taxes and dividends)

The discussion about succession and its impact at Safaricom comes exactly seven years after Collymore took over from Michael Joseph as CEO. He then made his formal debut announcing the half-year results back then, and that event will recur again tomorrow (Friday) when Safaricom releases its 2018 half-year results. Also at the results announcement, updates will be given on the e-commerce plans and international expansion of the M-pesa platform. 

CFO Kamath with CEO Collymore and Chairman Nganga at the Safaricom 2017 results announcement in May 2017

At the announcement of another year of record 2017 financial results announcement in May this year, company chairman, Nicholas Nganga announced that the expiring contract of Collymore had been extended for another two years. No interim CEO will be appointed at Safaricom, Collymore came to Safaricom from Vodafone, but an appointment of a CEO is one of the governance clauses that changed with the Vodacom buyout of Vodafone’s interest in Safaricom in the middle of the year.

The Safaricom Sustainability Report for 2017 which Collymore launched a month ago, noted that the company’s shareholding had experienced a decline in local and retail shareholders due to their profit-taking from the company’s high share price and a corresponding increase in investment stakes of foreign corporate investors due to Safaricom’s performance and strong fundamentals.

Safaricom Twaweza

Safaricom launched a new brand called Twaweza this weekend, at a swanky ceremony in marked contrast to past subtle changes to the logo of the company.

Director Sylvia Mulinge narrated the seventeen year history of the company from being a department at Telkom Kenya, to becoming Kenya’s largest company, with its ups (choosing to bill its customers per second for every call [which enabled it to leapfrog its competitor who billed per minute], rolling out Simu ya Jamii, 3G data, M-Pesa in 2007, and the Safaricom IPO and listing in 2008). She also listed some missteps made, such as rolling out unlimited data to customers, and slow upgrades to their network that led to infamous Friday congestion – and which then-CEO Michael Joseph attributed to “peculiar Kenyan” phone calling habits that.

Twaweza, announced by CEO Bob Collymore, signals the switch of Safaricom from being a telecommunications company to a digital lifestyle enabler for Kenyans to connect and do more with their lives using the Safaricom network and ecosystem.

Vodacom buys Vodafone Stake at Safaricom

Early this morning a surprising news story first appeared at Bloomberg about Vodacom buying shares at Safaricom. Early interpretations of the story had the Kenya government selling their entire 35% of their most valuable investment to Vodacom.

But later, the official statement from Vodafone (and Safaricom) confirmed that Vodafone was the one selling 35% of their shareholding to Vodacom. It includes a statement by Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore that the deal “promotes the continued successful expansion of the company as well as the opportunity to drive M-PESA to other markets in the continent.”

  • Safaricom had announced another record earnings year year, last week.
  • Will there be a rebrand to Vodacom? Safari com may be constrained by operating in Kenya. Vodacom just had an IPO in Tanzania whose outcome is pending and M-Pesa has had tremendous strides in Tanzania.
  •  Former Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph resigned from the Vodafone board a month ago to concentrate on his role as Kenya Airways Chairman.
  • Vodafone will remain with 5% of Safaricom – down from 39.93%.

Fintech Moment in East Africa: AmEx FT Pesalink Bitcoin

Recent events in the fintech (financial technology) payment space in East Africa.

Banks

  • The Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) unveiled Pesalink, a digital payments platform that is expected to cut the cost of transactions and transform the way consumers interact with their banks. Pesalink is a fully owned subsidiary of KBA and it will enable customers to make payments between banks in real-time, around the clock, without having to go through intermediaries. It has been approved at Standard Chartered, Co-Operative, Barclays, Commercial Bank of Africa, I&M, Diamond Trust, Gulf African, Guardian, Victoria, Credit, Prime and Middle East banks…“RT @alykhansatchu: .@HabilOlaka says @KenyaBankers will be targeting payments that exceed M-Pesa’s maximum transaction of ($675)”
  • Cooperative Bank: Is a demonstration that the how banks ar moving in the technology space. Kenya’s 3rd bank has adapted to their customers embrace and they enable more customers to use alternative channels for transactions.  They had a valentines’ week promotion to highlight and encourage customers to use alternative channels such as MCo-op Cash (get a loan straight from ones’ phone  at 1.16%  per month and send money to other MCo-op users for free) or at a Co-op Kwa Jirani agent (deposit cash into someone’s Co-op Account for FREE at a Co-op Kwa Jirani agent) or Co-Op cards.
  • KCB will unveil its fintech future – a strategy based on a digital finance  in Q2 of 2017
  • Another is EcoBank which launched a new mobile app which integrates Masterpass QR, a mobile payment solution from MasterCard.  It enables customers to send and receive money instantly across 32 other African countries.

Government

  • National Bank has launched cashlite payment solutions suite for county governments, Ministries, Government Agencies, and Departments. The bank has provided a variety of options for payments including mobile money, smart cards, and e-wallet and cash options, aligned with the continuing growth of mobile technology as well as consumers’ expectations for convenient mobile and online payments.
  • Strathmore University has supplied Busia county government with a revenue collection systems called CountyPro® with which the government hopes to grow revenue by 300%. It caters for all the unstructured county revenue sources including parking, market cess and trailer parking.
  • Mastercard is the technology partner for the Huduma Card in Kenya enabling payments for government services.  It is being issued by Commercial Bank of Africa, Diamond Trust, Equity, and Kenya Commercial banks. Kenyans will be able to pay for an array of enrolled Government services such as the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF), National Social Security Fund (NSSF) amongst others. 

Cards

  • mVisa will soon be in 10 countries as Visa expands its QR payment service for safe and easy mobile payments in emerging markets. It is already live in India, Kenya (started with Family Bank) and Rwanda, and will soon be available to merchants and consumers in Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam.. (mVisa) allows consumers to use their mobile phones to make cashless purchases at merchant outlets, pay bills remotely and even send money to friends and family members by securely linking their Visa debit, credit or prepaid account to the mVisa application. Also any bank’s mVisa customer – regardless of where they bank – can transact on any mVisa merchant and merchants do not need to invest in POS infrastructure. Visa has partnered with Co-Operative, Family, KCB, and NIC banks.
  • Mastercard committed to financially include 100,000 Kenyan micro merchants with Masterpass QR, a simple and secure digital payment solution. It will be introduced through various financial institutions. With it, consumers will be able to pay for in-store purchases by scanning the QR (Quick Response) code displayed at the checkout on their smartphones, or by entering a merchant identifier into their feature phones. Masterpass QR is currently being rolled out in Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania.
  • Safaricom has issued 16,000 Lipa na M-Pesa cards in the pilot phase of a project that will launch later in the year. The Lipa na M-Pesa card uses pin and chip technology…It is also equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) (which will) increases the speed at which customers make payments.
  • Verve: A dozen Kenya banks have partnered with Verve International, Africa’s leading low-cost payment network provider, in their push towards interconnectivity, cardless transact ability, and digital payments. Verve, best known as a card issuer has more than 32 million Verve cards and virtual/digital tokens issued across Africa and Verve is used in 19 African countries.
  • Pesapal adds American Express ​Pesapal integrated American Express into its payment platform on February 27, and  AmEx card holders can now use their cards to​ ​transact on any online payment portal that uses Pesapal. This is especially useful for hotels and other companies in the East African tourism space.  Pesapal which is in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Malawi and plans to expand to Nigeria in 2018 also offers an online booking engine for Hotels called ReservePort that’s used by Serena and Heritage brands.

Remittances

  • Facebook:  Facebook added international money transfers to its chat app. The service comes via London-based startup TransferWise in the form of a Facebook Messenger chatbot and enables transfers to and from the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Europe.
  • Bitpesa:  The company introduced an Africa to China corridor enabling users to send payments from Africa, directly to a Chinese bank account using bitcoin.
  • European choice: How much does it cost to send money from Germany to Kenya?@WehliyeMohamed posted that the global average cost for sending $200 in Q3 2016 was 7.42%, and that It cost him 6.7% to send money to Kenya. Then @MkenyaU answered that it costs 1.5% when he sends €200 from Germany and this reduces to 0.6% when he sends €500. He cautioned that some companies charge zero fees but their exchange rates are horrible as he shared a comparison of a dozen services available to send money from Germany to Kenya.

 

Mobile

  • Safaricom Mpesa: 10-year-old M-Pesa had 6 billion transactions in 2016 and is now in 10 countries – Albania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Romania, and Tanzania. A new feature in M-Pesa will enable users to see the cost of transactions. In the initial phase, customers will be notified of the costs after, and in the second phase customers will receive a pop up message informing them of any charges prior to the transactions, while the third phase will see the service being made available to value-added M-PESA financial products including M-Shwari, KCB M-PESA, Okoa Stima and M-Tiba. The second and third phases of the update will be rolled out in coming months.
  • There have been some calls and reports recommending that M-Pesa be split from Safaricom. This could have happened years ago, but it is more difficult now that M-Pesa is an entrenched and central part of Safaricom today.
  • Tala raised over $30 million in Series B financing, led by IVP and joined by Ribbit Capital.   Tala uses smartphone data to build financial identity ..  mobile app for Android aggregates more than 10,000 different data points on a customer’s device, including financial transactions, savings, network diversity, and geographic patterns, and builds a customized credit score, or financial identity. Tala operates in East Africa and Southeast Asia with its main top markets being Kenya and the Philippines. Tala has delivered more than one million loans totaling over $50 million, and more than one million individuals have accessed the product in East Africa alone. See how Tala compares to other (fintech) / phone-lending apps in Kenya.  Forbes termed this the largest Series B raised by a woman founder in recent memory.
  •  Zeep is a smart and simple mobile platform that helps young people (teens) nurture good financial habits. They ‘learn by doing’ within the framework of a secure financial environment with guidance from their parents.

Companies to watch

Irish Tech News released a list of 38 Kenya fintech companies to watch in 2017; these include Abacus, BitPesa, Branch, Cellulant, Chura, FarmDrive, Kopo Kopo, M-Changa, Pesapal, Tala, and Umati.

Summit

The FT Africa Payments Innovation Summit will take place on 29 March 2017..it will bring together 250 business leaders from various mobile and financial interest groups and explore challenges and opportunities inherent in these developments: from providing greater financial access to un-banked people across the continent to providing new services and opportunities for an emerging middle class.

Capping Kenya Bank Interest Rates – Part II

Today Kenya bank CEO’s met with the Central bank governor. They again stated their opposition to the interest rate capping act from parliament in an innovative and free market country, and urged the urged the president to refer the bill back to parliament for more consultations. They noted that between 35%  to 44%  of new loans would be locked out due to their risk classification.

They also announced a raft of measures to assuage customer dissatisfaction with the banking sector including:

  • A commitment to reduce interest rates in line with the KBRR (The Kenya Banks’ Reference Rate which was reduced from 9.87% to 8.9%) on  July 25, 2016
  • Cancellation of account closing charges.
  • A commitment to set aside Kshs 30 billion to finance small & medium enterprises, of which Kshs 10 billion would go to women and youth-owned micro enterprises – at not more than 14.5%. The allocation of each bank will be tracked and reported on a quarterly basis from November.
  • A commitment to classify customers at credit reference bureaus as low, medium and high risk and align interest rates to match such borrowers.
  • Re-launching the cost of credit web site to include bank loan data enabling loan applicants to easily compare bank products
  • Promoting alternative dispute resolution.

These are all things banks should have been doing, but were not.  The statement also noted that the banks pay Kshs 69 billion per year in taxes (corporation, excise, PAYE) and that the new bill would reduce income to the government by at least Kshs 17 billion. But this is at a time when Safaricom alone paid Kshs 63 billion to the government as taxes and licence fees.

$1 = Ksh 101