LIVE FROM MOBILE 360 – AFRICA, KIGALI, RWANDA: MTN Group’s head of mobile financial services Serigne Dioum (pictured) voiced optimism the operator could meet a lofty aim of becoming Africa’s largest financial technology player by 2021.

Dioum said by the end of 2018 it had 27 million active customers regularly using its financial services, which the operator aims to increase to 60 million by 2021. This is alongside actions to “really pick up the platform” and boost the number of places customers can make transactions.

“We want to become the transactional method of choice,” he added, noting the company also needed to increase the number of users taking wider services built on mobile money.

The comments came during a panel session on financial inclusion, held the day before the event’s mobile money leadership forum sub-event.

Elsewhere on the panel, CEO of mobile money transfer platform MFS Africa, Dare Okoudjou, said the industry was seeing a growing trend of enterprises of all sizes embedding mobile money into their operations now the core service had reached scale on the continent.

He added this was the result of the “hot trend” of digitisation, which all businesses are either in the process of implementing or at least considering, along with the widespread availability of digital ways of making transactions.