Telecomservice provider MTN-Rwanda and Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) have had to move swiftly to allay growing public fears of potential loss of savings as their new mobile telephone-linked banking product, MoKash, struggles to cope with traffic, leaving several clients wary and frustrated.

MoKash is a product that enables clients to borrow and save money using their mobile phones. The system is said to be experiencing hitches, a situation CBA and MTN-Rwanda said was due to overwhelming subscription rate that exceeded the initial capacity of the system.

The New Times has established that some of the subscribers to the platform have been experiencing challenges in accessing their savings and accounts on the platform and also could not access the short-term loans as had been promised.

This caused panic among clients with some fearing that they could lose their savings on the platform.

The challenges, experienced days after the product debut in the market, explain fears associated with technology-based banking platforms.

MTN-Rwanda and CBA explained that they faced technical glitches as the product hit the market due to overwhelming response. Currently, the platform has about 300,000 subscribers – which is more than the initial expectation of the system developers.

"The challenges faced on the MoKash platform have been technical in nature, particularly due to the overwhelming response received in the initial days after the product was launched,”Julian Mwika, CBA country service delivery manager, told The New Times.

"This slowed down the system performance affecting the customer experience and we carried out system enhancements on the platform to fix these challenges.”

However, he said they are monitoring the system and making necessary adjustments to deal with the challenge.

"We are continuously monitoring the effectiveness of the enhancements made and are currently satisfied that the challenges faced initially have now been dealt with permanently,” he said.

Glitch not new

The product is replication of what they have rolled out in other markets in the region, which the bank says at some point also experienced similar challenges.

"As was the case with the other markets where CBA has launched the mobile savings and loans product (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda), there are technical challenges after launch as the system adjusts,” Mwika said.

According to the developers of the product, the concerns cited in Rwanda were unlike what others experienced elsewhere and were especially persistent in February and March.

"The issues faced by customers in the early weeks of February and March are no longer happening and we continuously receive customer feedback and resolve any issues affecting their usage of the product,” the bank’s response  to The New Times reads in part.

‘Usual new market challenge’

MTN-Rwanda downplayed the challenges saying such issues are to be  expected in every new market, adding that they have since been corrected and they were monitoring the system.

"While there are some intermittent challenges that have been experienced as the system adjusts to new markets, these have been dealt with and we continue to monitor performance and growth of subscribers,” Jean Paul Musigi, the head of MTN Mobile Money service, told this paper.

Presently, the average value of the loans disbursed on MoKash is Rwf6,000 though the current range is Rwf1000 to Rwf20,000 for those that have been able to borrow.

The value of loans for each subscriber is based on their previous usage of MTN services to build a credit rating for the client. As such, different clients have different limits they can borrow.

Being a new technology-based platform and experiencing unexplained issues from the onset, a section of the public has been wary of the security of their money but the central bank has assured users that they are regulating the service.

The central bank vice governor, Monique Nsanzabaganwa, told The New Times that they have regulatory authority, both from perspectives of the bank and the mobile network operator, who is the service provider.

She said that clients can rest assured that if, there are serious faults and concerns, the central bank would step in.

"We are regulators and if it has serious faults we would know what to do. So they can have confidence in the system as far as regulation is concerned,” she said.

Across the East African region, the product has about 26 million subscribers on M-Shwari in Kenya, M-Pawa in Tanzania and MoKash in Uganda. Kenya is its largest market with an estimated 18 million subscribers.

The business model has been touted as the future of mobile money service, which has in recent years gained popularity. Mobile savings and loans can serve as a value addition.

In Rwanda, there are about 9.7 million registered mobile money accounts that, between December 2015 and December 2016, had about 205 million transactions valued at about Rwf1,040 billion, according to the central bank. 

editorial@newtimes.co.rw