Nigeria’s recently launched MTN Momo Super Agent on Tuesday said it has enrolled 10,000 agents across the country, after about a month the mobile phone network giant obtained a super-agent license from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
The Telco super-agent is targeting a multi-fold expansion in the short and medium terms. “The plan is to scale that number almost by tenfold by the end of the year and aggressively grow it on a year-to-year basis to about 500,000 in the next 4-5 years,” Usoro Usoro, director, Y’ello Digital Financial Services (YDFS), told BusinessDay in an exclusive interview.
Formally launched late August, YDFS MoMo Agent is a boutique of financial services targeted at enabling users to carry out transactions like bill payment, bank depository services or withdrawal from one’s bank account. In particular, one product in MoMo allows people without a bank account to be able to send money to each other.
“All you have to do is to walk up to any MoMo agent, hand cash to the agent and the money will be transferred and the recipient picks it up from any other MoMo agent,” Usoro said.
“Of all the bouquet of services we offer, that is the one we are really excited about because it speaks to the segment we are passionate about which is unbanked.”
MTN also said it was already carrying out mini launches in at least other five states in a bid to take the message further down to its customers. Asides Abuja, the Telco announced Owerri, Kano, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, and Lagos as states where market and on-the-street communication and engagement with its customers would hold. “That is not to say the service is not available nationwide,” he said.
Usoro said the move was in line with the firm’s vision to accelerate financial inclusion in the country through different ways, including partnerships and collaboration with other financial service providers.
However, he said the super-agent license, the first from the CBN, was proof of the evolution of its role in various capacities and it expects a transition “into something bigger” on account of on-going conversations with regulators in the financial space.
The 2018 EFINA Access to Financial Services survey findings showed that 36.8 percent of the adult population in the country is financially excluded.
Usoro said people are financially excluded because of issues relating to identity and access to any physical banking infrastructure.
“The agent network is one of the critical ways of fixing the issues around access …our efforts towards building the MoMo agent network would substantially address that problem” he said.
The Telco hopes to tap into its subscriber base of 65.4 million customers as at July 2019, according to Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) but the service would not be limited to only MTN customers even though the initial phase of the transfer service on MoMo may be so.
Godwin Emefiele, governor of the CBN said the payment services management department in the CBN would work to enable the build-up of a robust and secure payments infrastructure in Nigeria that is reliable and easy to access.
“We will reinvigorate our efforts at driving the cashless initiative across the country, due to the immense efficiency gains that will be derived from it, and the impact it could have on our financial inclusion drive,” Emefiele said in his fiver-year policy thrust.
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