After pulling the plug on its mobile money business in SA in 2016, MTN wanted to have another crack at financial services in its home market, CEO Rob Shuter said on Thursday. Due to high banking penetration rates in SA, mobile money "has been tried quite a few times here" without success, and the model was also not suited to Iran — MTN’s third-largest market — for similar reasons. "But we’re building quite a lot of new features around that: loan products, investment products, insurance.… It’s different across the different markets, but [advanced financial services] is a big focus of ours". The group was looking at "all markets". MTN had 22-million mobile money customers in 14 markets at the end of 2017. It wanted to add to this base, enter new markets and expand the range of services. "We need to have a proper strategy for the three large ones [SA, Nigeria and Iran]." The group introduced mobile money services in Sudan in 2017 through a partnership, but may look to transfer the serv...
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