Zain announced plans yesterday to bring its mobile banking service Zap, to all of its 22 operations across Middle East and Africa, with the initial programme being launched in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Zain has overcome regulatory hurdles in to launch the Zap M-banking service Kenya, and will compete with Safaricom’s M-Pesa service which has five million registered users

The Kuwaiti operator has partnered with leading international and regional banks including Citigroup and Standard Chartered to launch the mobile banking service in the three East African countries.

The service will allow Zap users across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to use their mobile phone to pay bills for goods and services, make remittances to other mobile users or bank accounts, top up airtime, send airtime to other Zain customers within the three countries, and to manage their bank accounts.

“With a potential customer base of over 100 million people in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, many of whom have never had access to formal financial services, we believe Zap will reshape the future of banking in Africa,” stated Saad Al Barrak, CEO of Zain Group.

With yesterday’s launch, Zain has overcome some earlier delays which it faced in gaining regulatory approval for its banking service in Kenya. Earlier this month, Zain Kenya’s CEO Rene Menza stated that the Central Bank was holding up the award of the banking licence to Zain, and as a result the operator was considering legal action, according to local news reports.

Now that Zain has the green light to launch Zap in Kenya, it will face strong competition from market leader Safaricom which not only has market share of 80 per cent, but its highly successful M-Pesa service has been the flagship mobile remittance and banking service in Africa, and has just hit five million registered users. Transactions in Q308 amounted to KES9.6 billion (US$135 million).

Zain, which is the fourth largest mobile network in the world by geographic presence, has not announced when it plans to extend the service to its other subsidiaries.

Image courtesy of GSMA and Decisive Media

Related stories:

M-Pesa: Paying the piper

Viva launches M-payments solution in Kuwait

As mobile penetration continues to outstrip banking facilities across emerging markets by some measure, mobile operators are jumping on the bandwagon to provide mobile banking services to the massive unbanked population. With an estimated 200 million more mobile users than bank customers in the MEA region by 2012 according to analysts, Michelle Mills assesses the factors that have helped the industry-changing M-Pesa mobile remittance service become a sensation in Kenya, and what operators keen on replicating M-Pesa’s success need to know

Mobile-assisted banking has been around for about a decade but with limited appeal in developed economies, where banking services are readily available to most segments of the population. In recent years, the strong correlation between the scarcity of banking infrastructure with the escalating volume of mobile phone users across Africa and the Indian sub-continent, has led to the deployment of several banking and remittance services where the mobile phone acts as a digital wallet. The latter has been defined as ‘transformational mobile banking’ where the mobile phone is central to the service and where no previous relationship with a bank is required, as opposed to ‘additive mobile banking’ where the phone provides a channel to existing bank accounts.

Continue reading →

Omantel recorded a 67 per cent drop in fourth quarter net profit to OMR9.744 million (US$25.31 million) on the back of OMR18.88 million of impairment losses related to its Pakistan subsidiary Worldcall Telecom.

"Deteriorating market conditions in Pakistan due to global financial crisis had an impact on the value of strategic investment made in Pakistan," the operator said in a statement.

Omantel’s full yet profit attributable to shareholders in 2008 came to OMR116.714 million, up 4.2 per cent from OMR112.032 million a year earlier.

The company’s customer base rose 58.1 per cent to 2.955 million subscribers, with 836,000 subscribers in Pakistan. State-controlled Omantel holds 56.8 per cent of Worldcall, which also operates in Sri Lanka.

Research conducted by Comm. shows that close to 100,000 job cuts have been announced by major global telecoms operators and suppliers since January 2008, with the number of redundancies looking to increase further in 2009. Michelle Mills reviews the rationale behind the job losses and looks to quantify how many more jobs are likely to be lost before any recovery occurs

As the February issue of Comm. was going to print, US operator Sprint Nextel announced the axing of 8,000 jobs at the operator, adding to the mounting toll of telecoms redundancies. Combined with the 4,000 positions the challenged CDMA/WiMAX/iDEN operator axed in January 2008, the numbers place it on par with fellow US provider AT&T, as telecoms outfits that have announced significant job cuts over the past 13 months.

Continue reading →

Comium Data, the Internet arm of Middle East and Africa telecoms provider Comium Group Holding, has secured a broadband wireless Internet licence in Rwanda, giving it a foothold to bring WiMAX to the east African country.

The Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) awarded the licence, bringing Comium Data’s wireless Internet and data licences to 11. The provider’s footprint extends across East and West Africa, as well as Lebanon, where the company’s operations are headquartered.

The company’s vision is to be the leading operator in Africa in the provision of broadband wireless Internet using the WiMAX standard. Other countries where it has licences include Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Burundi.

“Rwanda is a market with remarkable growth potential and we believe that Comium Data will be able to offer services that truly enrich people’s lives as well as making major economic contribution to the country through enabling better and more sophisticated communications,” stated Tony Ghattas, chief operational officer of Comium Data.

As part of the Rwandan government’s 2020 vision, the ICT sector is being given prime importance as the country pursues socio-economic development. It is estimated that Rwanda’s ICT sector surpassed the US$50 million mark last year.

Regionally, Comium Group Holding operates mobile and fixed networks in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and The Gambia. The group offers a diverse portfolio of telecoms and Internet services across 17 countries in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.