CASE STUDY
AFRICA IS READY FOR DIGITISATION,
AND WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN GOOD
TRACTION IN SA WITH OUR MUKURU
CARD PRODUCT.
On the two days before Christmas last year
we were doing three transactions a second
in peak periods, if we were thinking about
that five years ago that would have been
nigh on impossible for us to envisage. So,
at the same time, making use of the AWS
stacks that we can spin servers up and run
them down when we don’t need to, and
having that sort of dexterity in our DevOps
team, has been critical for us.
Do you have any partners that you
work with?
We have a whole range of partners through
the value chain. We do have the benefit
of having first-to-last mile capabilities
ourselves. So, if you did want to, you could
sign up at a Mukuru branch, you could pay
for your transaction at a Mukuru branch
or using our card, somebody could pick it
up on the other side at a Mukuru booth
for example. But our business has really
been built with partnerships that we have
with retailers, with payment aggregators,
with card processers, with pay-out partners
on the other side and depending on the
territory, we work with physical logistics
partners, cash-in and cash-out partners, and
people who assist us in the technological
chain where they are far better suited to
provide the service than we can.
Can you mention who your
partners are?
Through our partnerships we have over
300,000 pay-in and pay-out points across
Africa. We’ve partnered with major banks
in all the territories we operate in – if we
don’t have a licence, particularly at the
outset of a product or service offering,
in the country, then we have to use an
authorised dealer bank.
We work with the big retailers in South
Africa, that have been exceptional at
making their branch infrastructure
with their footprint available to
digital services.
So we work with all the big retailers in
South Africa and similarly so in other
territories, so companies like Shoprite,
Pick n Pay,Boxer, Spar, PEP, Massmart,
complemented by mobile wallets like
mPesa – a range of key names. •
www.intelligentcio.com
INTELLIGENTCIO
53