Zambia vs Niger Tickets at 5% Discount with MTN’s Mobile Money
MTN did it again for the fans.
Last time they gave such an offer to attract football fans, tickets were sold at a 10% discount if subscribers bought them using their mobile money accounts. All they had to do was pay for it when they visit participating service centres.
The centres this time are:
MTN Kitwe Service Centre
MTN Ndola Service Centre
MTN Chingola Service Centre
MTN Head Office ()
Cairo Road Service Centre
Levy Mall Service Centre
It comes as no surprise as MTN Zambia are the main sponsors of the Zambia National Team so what better way to get fans feeling ‘appreciated’ than by offering them a discount, even though it has dropped to 5% this time around.
Anyway, the use of the mobile money platform must be to promote its use and grow its popularity for bill payments. Zambia has not become as dependent on mobile money payments as some other countries.
Despite its convenience, the usual outages of the service make it very hard to trust that the service will work everytime you need to pay for a bill. This results in subscribers opting to do the rather inconvenient walk in to a store/company whom they make payments to, rather than using mobile money.
After observing how major mobile money markets work, the service is only a success when expanded to more than just utility bill payments like water, sewerage. Interconnectivity with other industries is key. MTN Zambia so far has since entered the food industry with Debonairs pizza partnering to give away a free pizza, basically operating on a buy-one-get-one-free basis. Read more about the pizza story here.
To be honest, the mobile money has taken a lot of time to grow in Zambia, even with a high ratio of unbanked people who don’t keep money in banks or are far from utility companies but still need to make payments. The thing is they all most likely have cellphones, which is the only tool needed for mobile money payments so yes, there is a large potential market out there for the service.
The only challenges so far are tough regulations in the financial sector, the lack of technological skills, the interest rates on transactions made, and also ignorance about the service itself by subscribers. Unless these issues are taken care of, we’ll still face low numbers of users.
One-time campaigns will not make much of an impact. Consistency and versatility are needed, versatility in terms of the service being inter-operable regardless of whether the transaction is being made between numbers on the same network or not.
To MTN Zambia, I applaud the effort in getting what I think is the biggest target market, the passionate football fan, to pay attention to the mobile money. May the best team in the Zambia vs Niger game win!
Image Credit: MTN Zambia
