The Mobile Money industry received recognition with the inaugural award for Mobile Money Services at the annual GSMA awards ceremony being presented to Zain for their Zap service. It was great to see the hardworking people at Zain getting acknowledgement for their efforts through this prize and I would like to congratulate George and his team in this regard. (Read here).In the spirit of this controversial blog, two points must however be highlighted. It would not be fair to the readers of this blog, if I do not highlight some controversial aspects:
- The ZAP product in terms of its scope and application seems to be ambitious. Zain is tackling the MMU problem in a different way with innovative thinking. Yet, the success of the solution should not be just measured on the basis of features only, but how well it is received and the volume of use. In this regard, it seems as if the service is not doing that well. (Read here, here)
- The claim of having the service available to 12 million subscribers in seven countries (or as Mr Hajeri said: "active subscribers" when he received the award), is clearly misleading. The total Zain subscriber base in the seven countries (Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Ghana) is just more than 13 million. To claim 12 million subscribers is a bit ambitious, especially when the country managers in Sierra Leone reported only 5 000 subscribers recently (Read here).