In the next month or so, MTN plans to launch an instant messaging platform which it hopes will become the “African WeChat”. The instant
messaging (IM) service is similar to China’s “WeChat” and Facebook’s “WhatsApp”.
According to MTN Group President and CEO, Rob Shuter, “We’ve built an instant-messaging platform that will be integrated with mobile money to form the first step of what we call the ‘African WeChat.”
We intend to launch it across the entire portfolio, South Africa included, but we will start with the West and Central Africa (WECA) markets as a kind of a pilot or beta stage,” Shuter said.
The app will be launched in MTN markets in West Africa first as part of a “beta-testing” phase. The plan is to introduce it to all the countries in which it operates, including South Africa. A key difference will be the ability for users to exchange messages who don’t have a data plan through inter-operability with SMS.
Shuter said the messaging app will also be different from its peers as MTN is building in SMS integration.
“The existing instant messaging apps only really work from a data subscriber to a data subscriber. As the penetration of data customers increases in our market, increasingly they will be conversing with non-data subscribers, so this is going to be an important differential between the existing instant messaging apps and the one we are building.”
Apart from the messaging app, MTN also wants to launch its own music streaming application in 2019 as an extension of its digital strategy and spread MTN Mobile Money into new geographies.
