Senegal is experiencing a mobile money revolution,

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Global Courant 2023-04-11 14:00:00

Coura Sène tends to be media shy, so when she agreed to be interviewed, we jumped at the chance. Wave is a success story in digital payments. We meet Sène at his West African headquarters, a rocket-shaped building that seems to be hurtling toward the sky. Five years after entering the Senegalese market, Wave has dethroned incumbent operator Orange Money – managed by French telecommunications group Orange – and pushed the latter to cut its transaction rates by nearly 80%.

Wave, an app-based payment solution, raised $200 million in September 2021. It has now expanded to three other West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) countries – Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Mali – as well as Uganda and Gambia.

But it is the operation in Senegal that acted as a catalyst for regional growth and provided the blueprint for the current business model. As Sène, who is seen as one of Africa’s rising stars among the fintech community, outlines in this interview, the country is on track to become an increasingly cashless society, thanks to the promising future of mobile money.

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We have a simple offering: affordable mobile financial services, tailored to the needs of individuals and businesses. Our services help people send and receive money, pay bills, and make purchases securely.

We started operations in February 2018 in Senegal, in collaboration with Nigeria-based bank UBA, and then with a second partner bank, Ecobank. Last April, we obtained a direct license from the BCEAO (the central bank of the WAEMU countries), which allows us to work without intermediaries. We now want to extend this license to the other WAEMU countries.

But to answer your question more specifically, when we entered the Senegalese market, we sought to understand customer needs in digital financial services, which allowed us to design the most inclusive financial product that exists in the mobile money environment. We’ve designed a simplified customer journey – and the technology we use allows us to be effective in terms of customer service and complaint handling, all of which help build trust.

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