PROFILE
C
Can you provide some background
details about your current position
at Mastercard?
I am the MEA lead for Digital Payments
and Labs and am in charge of developing
solutions and executing market strategies
for cash displacement and leveraging
digital payment technologies. I also lead
the Labs organisation in the region, which is
Mastercard’s Centre of Excellence focused
on new innovation with a special focus on
financial inclusion.
Prior to this role, I was Middle East and North
Africa Division Lead for Global Processing,
which was focused on developing and
executing market strategies and national
ecosystem development across the cluster.
How can companies be innovative
in Africa?
Building the right solutions that aim
to disrupt existing technologies. In the
era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
emerging technologies such as Artificial
Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotic
Process Automation and Blockchain are
ruling the roost in terms of their use-cases
for commercial purposes. Emerging markets
are set to contribute a large percentage to
that number, with African Analysis predicting
that the Internet of Things in South Africa
will grow to 35 million by next year. The
boundaries of technologies continue to
increase and there has never been a better
time in history for innovators to experiment,
build and test new solutions.
When building new products, it is crucial for
digital disruptors to always keep in mind
the unique needs of each market in which
they operate. In a world where everything
you want can be bespoke or artisanal,
consumers have little time for services that
don’t take their particular context or needs
into consideration.
A few years ago, when Mastercard was
designing Quick Response (QR) payment
WHEN WE LOOKED ELSEWHERE IN
AFRICA, MANY PEOPLE DIDN’T HAVE
CARDS, SO MASTERCARD DESIGNED A
SOLUTION CALLED MASTERCARD QR.
solutions for markets in Africa, the biggest
discussion at the time revolved around
driving local adoption by working with the
systems and infrastructure those markets
already had in place.
In South Africa, this meant designing a
QR payment solution – Masterpass – that
was card-based. Why? Because in South
Africa, 80% of the population already had a
payment card.
To use the service, consumers load any bank
card into the secure Masterpass digital
wallet on their mobile phones and scan a
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QR code displayed on a website or at the
point of sale to make a payment. When we
looked elsewhere in Africa, many people
didn’t have cards, so Mastercard designed a
solution called Mastercard QR. This solution
enables consumers to pay merchants
directly from their mobile money or bank
accounts using either a smartphone to scan
a QR code or a feature phone to enter a
text code at checkout.
The experience mimics a cash transaction
as the consumer ‘pushes’ payment to the
merchant, which is received almost instantly.
For merchants, Mastercard QR provides an
affordable way to accept digital payments
from a range of different payment providers
(mobile money or banks) – even where
traditional card payment infrastructure, or an
electric grid, may not be present.
You have talked about exponential
innovation. Can you explain what
this is?
When Uber was trying to solve the problem
of taxi availability anytime, anywhere,
it invented an entirely new concept and
caused a paradigm shift. Now, every car on
the road can potentially become a taxi and
the industry has changed forever. Airbnb
in the hospitality industry and Spotify and
Netflix in the entertainment industry have
done the same.
Similarly, in the payments industry, when
tokenisation technology was introduced, it
was a conceptual shift in thinking. Should
card data be compromised, the data became
useless to fraudsters. This not only helped to
protect consumers’ financial data, but also
boosted consumer confidence in an industry
becoming increasingly more digital.
This is the very definition of exponential
innovation – it goes above incremental
innovation to reimagine the consumer
experience and create efficiencies within
the industry’s value chain. It challenges
the status quo, looks at pain points with
a different set of lenses, with the aim to
eliminate them, not just reduce them.
It is necessary to approach your product
or service from the viewpoint of the end-
consumer. Every organisation today is a
B2C organisation, not a B2B or a B2G,
because ultimately the work you do will have
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