Airtel-Tigo On Monday announced that they had completed the process of integrating their mobile financial services platforms, paving way for its subscribers to start transacting across all platforms.

Previously, Airtel Money and Tigo Cash were two different platforms since the two telecommunications companies merged. At the time subscribers were not able to transact across both platforms.

"We have been able to finally integrate both our mobile financial services platforms. At the moment, we are on one platform. Now customers can transact between Tigo Cash and Airtel Money,” Airtel-Tigo Managing Director, Amit Chawla, told the press on Monday.

With the evolvement of mobile financial services, the firm says the new platform can accommodate other services and products, including handling loans, insurance and micro-finance schemes, all of which are expected to be launched in the near future.

"Some of the products like loan products and insurance products, we are already in talks with integrators as well as financial institutions. Very shortly we will introduce them to the market,” Chawla noted.

He highlighted that they also plan to integrate with more companies and financial services institutions to add more features on the platform, all of which is being done to improve customer experience and contribute to promoting financial inclusion that the country wants to achieve.

Before the two telecom firms merged, they had varied services beyond cash in and cash out and enabling cross-border remittances.

For instance, Tigo Cash was operating a platform that was enabling over 10,000 tea farmers in two tea plantations located in Mulindi and Rusizi District to get their salaries directly on their mobile wallets.

At the same time, Tigo had an insurance product, Ingoboka Cash, which allowed certain customers to get help in case of hospitalisation beyond three days.

With the integration of the two platforms, Chawla said the services will still be available.

Currently, Airtel-Tigo has a combined subscriber base of over 4 million across its mobile financial services platforms, with the Managing Director indicating that the transactions processed across the platforms have been increasing over time.

Last year, the firm introduced a profit share distribution scheme which saw them starting to distribute interest generated from mobile money trust accounts in the form of a quarterly distribution to its customers.

According to statistics from Rwanda Utility Regulatory Authority (RURA), as of 2018 in the third quarter, mobile money subscribers were 10.7 million while 97.1 million mobile money transactions worth Rw826.7 billion had been performed.

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