MTN Uganda Mobile Money customers will transact with much more convenience after the telecom giant announced new services towards achieving interoperability.
Users of MTN Mobile Money can now send and receive money from MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money customers, Africell Money customers and now UTL M-Sente customers.
The move follows a directive by Bank of Uganda last year to all Mobile Money operations in Uganda to be interoperable between the local telecommunications companies.
This would ensure that customers from different networks are able to seamlessly send and receive funds directly across all networks.
Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system, whose interfaces are completely understood, to work with other products or systems, at present or in the future, in either implementation or access, without any restrictions.
In telecommunications, network interoperability is the continuous ability to send and receive data among the interconnected networks, providing the quality level expected by the end user without any negative impact to the sending and receiving networks.
“MTN Uganda has announced that it has completed (the final) Phase 3 which has seen UTL being switched on, making MTN the first telco in Uganda to fully comply with the Bank of Uganda initiative,” MTN said in a statement.
MTN had embarked on integration with other operators starting with Phase 1 which involved the onboarding of Airtel followed by Phase 2 which involved the onboarding of Africell.
Elsa Muzzolini who is MTN’s General Manager Mobile Financial Services described the development as a “momentous move” which is aimed at customers “experiencing simplicity and efficiency in mobile money transactions across all networks”.
“Now that we have completed this third and final stage, we believe that the winner in all this is the MTN Mobile Money customer who will experience a seamless user experience because they will now be able to send money to all mobile money networks in Uganda without extra hustles” said Elsa.
“We further believe, in line with our group strategy, that this move will drive financial inclusion and ensure digitization of cash transfer in the ecosystem while also fostering efficiency of payments. Because everyone deserves the benefits of a modern connected life, mobile money transfers should neither be prohibitive or discriminatory.”
In a related development, MTN Uganda has also integrated with regional operators in Kenya and Rwanda to enable MTN Mobile Money customers to send and receive money around the East African region – specifically to MTN Rwanda and Safaricom MPesa – with Tanzania to be on boarded in early 2019.
To send money the customer dials *165*1# and selects International Transfer.