Tigo Rwanda has announced a new initiative with 70
Umurenge SACCOS that will avail mobile financial services to more than 77,000
Customers in 20 districts nationwide. Under this partnership, customers with
both bank accounts in SACCOS and Tigo cash wallets will find the two platforms
fully integrated; customers can now transfer funds from their SACCO accounts to
their Tigo Cash wallets and vice versa automatically.
Commenting on this new partnership, Tigo
Rwanda Head of Mobile Financial Services, Faith Chisulo said:
“Since their creation, SACCOs have proved
to be a great contributor to financial inclusion amongst the Rwandan population
especially in rural areas. We believe that by connecting these Saccos to our
Tigo Cash system, we will allow these financial institutions to scale up
because many of them cannot open branches around the areas they would want to
cover. This partnership will increase the number of banked population”.
To access the services, members of the SACCO simply dial
*500# , Choose the ‘Banking’ Option, Choose ‘SACCO’ and follow the prompts.
According to Central Bank figures between December 2012
and December 2015, the number of mobile money accounts increased by 432% from
1,440,541 to 7,663,199, the number of transactions using mobile money increased
by 659.8% from 22,191,674 to 168,612,455 and the number of agents increased by
1211.7% from 3,085 to 40,467 in the period under review. This development is
expected to have increased formal access to financial service between 2012 and
2015 more than what was achieved between 2008 and 2012.
Tigo Rwanda Head of Mobile Financial Services, Faith
Chisulo added: “SACCOs are located in some areas that are a bit challenging
to some of their customers in terms of access. This new platform will help our
customers who live far away from their local SACCO Branch from wasting precious
time travelling long distances”.
In addition to this new partnership with Umurenge SACCOs,
Tigo has had a similar platform with three local commercial banks namely Access
Bank, Kenya Commercial Bank and Bank of Kigali since 2014.
Over $350 million has been transacted through the Tigo
Cash system since its inception and over 2.7 million customers use the
platform.
About Tigo Rwanda
Tigo Rwanda is owned by Millicom, a leading
telecommunications and media company uniquely dedicated to emerging markets in
Latin America and Africa. It provides mobile, mobile financial, cable and
satellite services to over 60 million customers in fourteen countries,
primarily under the Tigo brand. Tigo has been operating in Africa since 1993,
in Rwanda since 2009, and serves over 26 million customers in Africa.
Currently, Tigo Rwanda has over three
million customers and has invested over US $310 million from 2009 to
date. Tigo Rwanda provides 4G LTE on mobile for both prepaid and
post-paid customers. Tigo Rwanda was awarded as the ‘Most Innovative
Service’ at Africa Com 2014, for international mobile money transfers with
integrated currency conversion between Tigo Rwanda and Tigo Tanzania as well as
awarded for “Best ICT Exhibitor” at the Kigali Expo 2015.
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