Mobile Money Operations

Week 2: Planning a Roll-Out

TRANSCRIPT
There is a lot to think about in the roll-out of Mobile Money. Its best that we plan well. Let’s
set some performance objectives for our service before drafting our rollout plan, here are
some examples.

• A 5-star customer experience regardless of the customer touch point.

• Another could be that 50% of your existing customer base have adopted Mobile
Money within three years of launch.
• 30% or more of these customers should be active.
• 50% of customers have your brand top-of-mind within two years of launch.
• A fifth objective could be that functionality provides for 50% of all customers
financial use cases within five years from launch.
• Proximity to the customer is essential and so let’s plan for a MM service that is
available within a 5km radius from our customers.

Next let’s look deeper into each of these and incorporate them into our rollout plan.

Let’s start with the example of customer experience.

• First, we will need to train staff. A comprehensive training plan is essential to ensure
staff of all customer touch points are properly equipped with product knowledge.
• Plan field visits and mystery shopping excursions as a way to assess service quality
at service points.
• Build a performance management framework by including customer service into
the KPIs of customer touch point staff.
• Motivated agents are brand and service ambassadors so plan work streams to
support the building and selling of a favourable agent value proposition, an agent
rollout and plan to manage agents.

Now let’s turn to the objective of wanting a large percentage of our customer base to adopt
the new mobile money service.

• Here we need to ensure that the account opening processes are defined and include
steps taken to comply to regulations around KYC, and that this account opening
process is very easy for the customer.
• We need to ensure that the functionality is easy to use. Has the design, user
acceptance testing and piloting shown that it is easy for customers to perform
mobile money transactions using the channels provided to them?
• How available is the service? How well spread and relevant is your agent network
to your customers.
• How smooth is the journey for the customer from account opening, to doing a few
transactions per month, to becoming a habitual user?

Next, we set tasks to ensure that at least 30% of our customers are active, within three years
after launch. Let’s briefly discuss three activation strategies: Agent commissions that drive
active customer bases:
 • Agent commission should be structured in a way that incentivises agents to drive
active customer behaviour.
• Similarly, customer pricing should drive usage in a way that promotes profitability
or steers customer behaviour.
• Roll out plans should include merchant roll out and enablement of merchants with
support materials and training at the POS.
• The more relevant use cases are to the consumer the higher the chances of
customers using their Mobile Money wallets.

Set yourself the objective of having 50% top-of-mind brand awareness two years after
launch.

With this, consider that agent locations are the most pertinent and well frequented
customer touch points. Branding and signage of agent locations will help make customers
more aware of the brand on a grass root level.

Marketing campaigns will help make customers more aware of the brand through media
like radio, billboards, print and TV.

Customer Promotions and Competitions are powerful tools to nudge consumer awareness
and uptake higher.

Here are some ways to ensure that our service share-of-wallet is maximised.

• Customer Research is a good place to start to determine all the customer use cases
for financial transactions being conducted without a mobile money wallet.
• The next logical step is to develop use cases from a Mobile Money perspective for
all the functionality that is deemed most relevant.
• Sequencing the rollout of functionality by setting a product roadmap helps with the
prioritization and rollout of customer functionality from launch to going into the
future.
• Integration into the infrastructure of banks and third parties will get our customers
plugged into the wider financial ecosystem.

The stronger the distribution network through which our customers can sign up and
transact, the better for the business. If you recall, we set the objective of having the service
available within a maximum radius of 5km from our customers. Let’s look at four tactical
plans to get this right.

• First and foremost, the business must make money for our agents. It does not matter
how many agent locations we have if we don’t have a compelling financial agent
value proposition.
• Once you have a solid agent value proposition, you can begin to establish your
agent network. Planning for an agent network rollout needs to consider the number
of customers per agent and the distance to the closest agent.
• Customers need access to their cash 24/7. A partnership with a bank that has an
ATM network may help with expanding your service footprint. Bank integration gives
 us the ability to be integrated into bank channels like ATMs which can provide a
24/7 offering to customers.
• Integration into larger merchants and gives our customers access to service in the
location they already shop – this level of convenience will be greatly appreciated by
your customer base.

Now that we have established plans around each of our business objectives, let’s get to the
actual roll out.

At this point, the Mobile Money Business is still very much a project, and most organizations
start by hiring a Project Manager. This individual will put the foundations of the business in
place and work towards operationalizing it.

It’s likely that the long-term business owner is different from the initial Project Manager.
The deployed stage of the business will require more of a commercially minded leader than
this initial operational executer.

The first set of activities the Mobile Money Project Manager will need to undertake are the
early stage building blocks, some of which we covered in last week’s videos.

The next set of activities our Mobile Money Project Manager will need to do is establish
operations. Implementing the platform is probably one of the key examples.

Let’s now look at the sequential flow of rollout activities over time, assuming we are a
business unit in a wider organisation and not a new company.

In this example, the project took 18 months to get to launch with much of the planning and
approvals in the first six months and preparing operations for launch in months 6-17. Note
the rise in human capital needed to operationalize Mobile Money. Keep in mind that this
head count doesn’t include the operational staff required including back office, call centre,
agent sales, fraud, etc.

And then, finally in month 18, a launch event, we did it – we finally launched Mobile Money!

Lets look at the key take aways from this video:

• Framing your rollout planning within a set of business objectives will help focus your
project tasks on the right outcomes.
• Mobile Money is a complex multi-faceted business, often mistaken as simply the
implementation of a technical platform.
• Mobile Money requires a full court of business units that are new if you are a new
company or adapted if you are an established company with Mobile Money as a
business unit.
• A successful rollout is very dependent on user journeys, agent incentives and solid
back-office operations.
• Mobile Money Businesses almost always underestimate the human and investment
capital required to build and run Mobile Money.