By enrolling on the MoMoPay platform, your goal could have been to simply receive digital payments and make your business more efficient. However, MTN MoMoPay is not your ordinary kind of platform that allows you to only receive digital payments.
It, according to the MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited Managing Director Stephen Mutana, creates new lines of business for small business owners to earn extra income.
Mutana says that a merchant that uses the MoMoPay platform can also sell airtime and earn 4% commission; can facilitate school fees, and pay utility bills among others.
“MoMoPay is a full end-to-end proposition that not only allows you to receive digital payments and makes your business more efficient but it also brings new lines of business into your business,” Mutana says.
He adds: “Wherever you see a MoMoPay merchant, however informal they are, it is a business in a box; it not only allows them to receive digital payments but also allows them to receive other lines of business.”
How MTN MoMoPay works
MoMoPay is a product of MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited, which was recently split from MTN Uganda Limited, following the enactment of the National Payments Systems (NPS) Act last year. The NPS Act required telecommunications companies to separate their mobile money services from voice and data services and run them independently. That said, MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited is 100 percent owned by MTN Uganda Limited.
Mutana notes that the company applies a tiered Know-Your-Customer system which makes it easy for businesses to use the MoMoPay platform. Someone doing MoMoPay for their small business for instance only needs to have a fully registered SIM card while a big organization needs to provide a few more documents.
Even then, Mutana notes, they have made the process as seamless as possible, by availing digital onboarding kits that pick up all the required information easily.
He says that the company puts a customer in mind throughout the product development process.
“For people to get the full benefits of the cashless economy, they should be able to transact digitally anywhere; let it be at local hardware, a shop, or salon. But for them to pay cashless, the service has to be relevant to their life,” Mutana says.
He adds: “So we are the ones who should align ourselves to the needs of the customer and as our agenda, we are deeply embedded in the activities of making it easy, within the confines of the regulations, for people to onboard onto these digital services like MoMo Pay.”
The firm also runs the MoKash product, offering unsecured micro-loans and savings products, in partnership with NCBA bank.
It uses one’s information about usage patterns of MTN services to assess one’s creditworthiness.
Additionally, Mutana says the company is in the process of launching more products that specifically target businesses. Among them is the MoMo Business, which builds on MoMoPay but gives businesses more capabilities around invoicing payments and collection.
Use open APIs
To achieve full financial inclusion, Mutana says there is a need for financial literacy, translating material in local languages, and enhancing safety to engender and build people’s trust in using digital payment platforms.
Additionally, there is a need to make it easy and faster for entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to onboard on open APIs.
“We have open-APIs where we have standardized some of the key functions of mobile money like payments, collections, remittances, and bulk payments. The worst thing is to have a great idea and you get stuck at how you should digitize it. We have done a lot in that area, though there is still more to be done to get the developer community conversant with the standard APIs,” Mutana says.
The company is among the firms participating in the second edition of the 40-Days 40-FinTechs initiative, organized by HiPipo in partnership with Crosslake Technologies, ModusBox, and Mojaloop Foundation, and sponsored by the Gates Foundation.
The HiPipo Chief Executive Officer Innocent Kawooya says this edition is Uganda’s most comprehensive foray into things like distributed ledger technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Automated Customer Relationship Management, cash management, and lending platforms, among others. He applauds MTN Uganda for spearheading the digital economy revolution from game-changing products such as Mobile Money, MoMoPay, and MoKash.
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