Safaricom is consolidating its market position in Kenya as the nation’s largest telecom company and provider of the nation’s mobile money service, M-Pesa by launching a new innovation centre to evolve new products or businesses the company can venture into.
The Chief Innovation Officer, Kamal Bhattacharya, the objective of Safaricom Alpha is to identify the spending trends of mPesa users and turn those data into additional Safaricom products.
Bhattacharya added: “Safaricom’s unique in that we have telco services and a financial services platform that connects nearly every household in Kenya largely on the basis of trade. We’d actually like to move beyond M-Pesa by leveraging its power as a social network to connect people to other product solutions.”
Safaricom has 73 percent of Kenya’s mobile subscribers. Its M-Pesa fintech app―which generated $525 million of the telco’s $2 billion annual revenues―boasts 27 million customers across a network of 136,000 agents.
Noting Safaricom’s current customer-driven product view, Bhattacharya hopes the new Alpha innovation centre can find ways to “better adapt to our customer needs by taking a timeline view of a customer’s journey from when they join Safaricom to the present to offer commercial solutions for them.”
According to him, Safaricom is in a better position to do this than some of the social networking giants. “Facebook and others have connected people well on a social level, but are still at a fairly nascent stage in digital monetary transactions,” he said. “Safaricom already has an extensive network of people, merchants, and governments all connected through monetary transactions.”
He sees one of the innovation centre’s first products “as a messenger solution with full payment integration to better support the kind of social patterns that our customers are already using informally.”
Safaricom’s innovation centre will be located in Nairobi’s Kilimani neighbourhood, outside the company’s main office.
Some leadership positions have already been named. Former African Development Bank technology lead, Dr. Shikoh Gitua, will be Head of Products Innovation. Safaricom’s Veronica Ogeto-Tchoketch will head the innovation centre’s Strategic Partnerships unit and David Nyamai will manage a Business Intelligence and Big Data team.
