MTN hires FNB’s Bradwin Roper to head up SA fintech unit

The head of FNB’s mobile business is leaving to join MTN as its new chief of financial services for SA, the mobile operator announced on Tuesday. 

Bradwin Roper will move into the role of chief financial services officer with effect from May 15. He takes over from Felix Kamenga, who had been running the business unit since late 2018. 

Roper’s appointment makes sense given the adage that banks are trying to be more like telecom operators, while telecom operators are trying to be more like banks. 

With declining voice revenue and data margins squeezed due to public pressure and regulations, mobile operators have been looking at other ways to create revenue streams from their large customer bases. For MTN, which has about 289-million subscribers across Africa and the Middle East, fintech is one of its areas of focus, driven by mobile payments.

Since May 2020, Roper has been CEO of FNB Connect, which houses the bank’s mobile business, as well as its digital goods and devices arms. 

SA’s second-largest mobile operator described his appointment as “a deliberate move from MTN as it pushes forward in its evolution from telco to techco [technology company]”.

FNB Connect is also a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which means it leases network infrastructure from mobile operators to sell data and voice services to its customers. 

That unit made just more than R1bn turnover in the past financial year, with subscribers up 5% to 878,000, making FNB the largest such operator in the market. During Roper’s tenure, the unit was jointly awarded the world’s best digital MVNO by the World MVNO Congress.  

MTN’s financial services growth in SA has been hard won. The company first launched its mobile money platform locally in 2012 before pulling the plug in 2016 due to a lack of commercial viability because three-quarters of the population had bank accounts. Vodacom shut its M-Pesa mobile money service in SA in the same year, citing similar reasons.

Having taken a second swing at the SA market from the start of 2020, the operator now has a base of 6.5-million users. The unit offers a range of services, including in-store payments, prepaid services, mobile wallets, micro-loans, microinsurance and a point of sale solution

MTN SA CEO Charles Molapisi said the mobile operator was committed to bridging the digital divide and furthering financial inclusion.

“For us, this means continuing our focus on scaling our mobile financial services platform business to create a marketplace that supports cashless and digital economies through affordable, inclusive, understandable and comprehensive mobile services, especially in the rural communities. ”

Roper, who was previously CEO of FNB Lesotho and a business process engineer for Africa at Unilever, holds a BSc degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Gordon Institute of Business Science. 

gavazam@businesslive.co.za