When it comes to Africa and financial empowerment, we must acknowledge that consumers have the same wants and needs as consumers everywhere else in the world. Africans on the continent want to order the latest clothes, and electronics and have them delivered timeously.

We can agree that mobile money has done a lot to expand financial inclusion, but more is needed if they’re to seamlessly make purchases outside their countries and the continent. We must enable interoperability between mobile money and cards. 

That is, ensuring that merchants are able to accept payments from any consumer, whether they’re using mobile money or a card and whether they’re online or offline.

To understand the scale of the opportunity that interoperability represents, it’s worth taking a look at the African retail sector.

In a sector worth hundreds of billions of dollars, online retail accounts for just one percent of sales, against a global average of 15%.

Interoperability between cards and mobile money has the potential to not just bring that ratio more in line with global standards but to grow the sector as a whole. The appetite, after all, is clearly there. 

The COVID 19 pandemic saw African eCommerce sales grow 42% between 2019 and 2020. Imagine what the growth will be like as people are able to buy and sell seamlessly, no matter where they are and what channel they use.

Beyond the mobile money narrative 

This focus on interoperability represents a slight shift from the mobile money narrative that’s dominated discourse to date (some might argue that even this narrative has been overly focused on the success of MPesa in Kenya, with people elsewhere on the continent simply seen as unbanked).

In many ways, it’s understandable that so much focus has been put on the mobile money narrative in Africa. Its growth has been nothing short of explosive.

According to GSMA’s 2022 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money, African mobile money transactions grew 39% in 2021 to reach US$701.4 billion, accounting for 70% of the global total. As a result, many of the world’s largest digital merchants – including the likes of Spotify in partnership with dLocal – have started accepting mobile money payments. 

By 2025, it’s estimated that some one million young people across Sub-Saharan Africa will have some kind of informal employment in the mobile sector, with many of them working as mobile money agents. 

Much of mobile money’s growth has been down to the fact that many Africans – around 57% of people on the continent, approximately 95 million people, do not have a traditional bank account. But for all the acceptance of mobile money, there are still instances where cards are the preferred payment method for consumers and merchants alike.  

It’s imperative, therefore, that we change the narrative from one where Africans will never have to adopt cards because of mobile money. Instead, we need to look towards facilitating interoperability between mobile money and cards and promoting adoption at scale.

Making payments truly borderless 

For the African fintech revolution to reach its true potential, interoperability cannot be confined to the continent. It needs to be completely borderless. 

That means that African consumers and businesses alike should be able to make payments to any destination, whether it’s online or offline. For us at MFS Africa, that means connecting mobile money to the rest of the world. Card networks very much appear to be the best way of doing so. It’s something that we’ve been working on for some time too. In 2019, for example, we concluded an agreement with Visa to connect our MFS Africa HUB to the Visa Network to enable card issuing at scale. It was a slow burn, but with the recent acquisition of US company GTP we’re in a prime position to accelerate interoperability. 

We’re not the only ones thinking this way either. The recent launch of the Mpesa Global card with Visa underscores how quickly international players are waking up to the need for interoperability. We are now at the point where the dream of every mobile money user having a card attached to their mobile money accounts is a feasible reality. In order for our continent to achieve the potential of the fintech revolution, mobile money needs to keep evolving and interoperability is key to that.

One of the most important aspects of this is the ability to define and respond to ever-evolving customer needs and expectations.

And in today’s market, it is, increasingly, the demand for corporate social responsibility that is significantly shaping consumer behavior. But what, exactly, is the connection between consumers and corporate social responsibility?

Why It Matters

Once upon a time, the relationship between most businesses and their target customers was largely transactional. Businesses offered good products and services at reasonable prices and that was sufficient to attract and retain customers.

Nowadays, however, consumers want more from the businesses they support. In particular, they want to be able to feel good about the purchases they make. They want to put their hard-earned money toward organizations whose values they feel align with their own.

Indeed, studies show that 77% of consumers state that they are more likely to buy from companies that they believe are working to make the world a better place. And that consideration is even more important for younger consumers, with 94% of Gen Zers looking to support businesses engaged in socially and environmentally responsible practices.

Financial Considerations

Despite the intense consumer demand for social responsibility in the marketplace, devising strategies for incorporating it into your business may seem like a formidable, perhaps even an impossible, task. After all, margins are often thin and the market remains quite volatile.

But there are ways that you can build your socially responsible brand without jeopardizing the bottom line. For instance, partnering with non-profits will enable you to expand your market reach, increase brand recognition, and support a positive brand identity. And each of those elements is a powerful driver of both sales and consumer loyalty.

When you partner with a non-profit, however, it’s imperative to assess the organization’s accounting practices. Ideally, the non-profit will employ a highly trained accountant, such as a Master’s degree holder.

Such advanced accreditation is often a prerequisite for success when providing accounting services for non-profits, as the standards, processes, and regulations relating to charitable organizations differ widely from those in for-profit enterprises.

Without the ethical and skilled practice of trained professionals, errors may be made and fraudulent activity may go undetected. And that can spell disaster not only for the non-profit but also for your company through its affiliations with the charity.

Non-Traditional Giving

When you think of corporate social responsibility, one of the first things that will likely come to mind is the donation of a portion of your company’s proceeds to a charity of your choice or that of your target consumer.

But the reality is that there are many ways to be socially responsible n your business, including a myriad of opportunities to support the non-profits that are meaningful to your company and your customer.

For instance, rather than making a financial commitment to the charity, consider donating some of your company time. You and your employees might volunteer to work a designated number of hours per month at a local non-profit, at local charity events, or even in serving the community, from planting trees to picking up debris to serving food at a local soup kitchen.

You can also lend some of your business skills to your chosen charity. For instance, non-profits can sometimes struggle with important functions such as social media marketing. After all, this is a highly specialized role that can also often be quite labor- and time-intensive. Many non-profits may struggle to find the financial and human resources to maintain an effective social media marketing presence.

And this is where your company comes in, because you can easily tie your social media marketing with those of your chosen charity. This will align your brands, expand your outreach, and enable you to build your socially responsible cred through social media, where those all-important Gen Z’ers are most likely to be found!

The Takeaway

The business world is perhaps more competitive than it has ever been. Today’s entrepreneurs must not only contend with rivals the next street over, but they must also differentiate themselves from a host of competitors who may be half a world or more away.

One of the most important tools for attracting consumers, though, is by cultivating a socially responsible business ethos.

Consumers are increasingly looking to put their money where their heart is and may well refuse to do business with companies whose values they feel conflict with their own.

The good news is that building a socially responsible brand does not have to be difficult. By partnering with reputable non-profits, you can grow your customer base and feel great about yourself and your company while you do it!