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MTN Group today announced the appointment of Burak Akinci as Chief Executive Officer of Simfy (ayoba), reporting to the MTN Group Chief Digital and Fintech Officer Serigne Dioum and responsible for the super app ayoba.  
 

Effective 1 September 2021, Burak joins Africa’s leading mobile operator from Turkcell, where he was CEO of BiP, an instant messaging platform with millions of users across 192 countries. Burak, with over 20 years of experience in marketing, digital businesses and technologies, led the build-out of the BiP platform, which has more than 30 million users. In his new role, he will be based in Cape Town.

“We are thrilled that an executive of Burak’s calibre is joining us. His appointment accelerates our work to build the largest and most valuable platforms as we target greater digital and financial inclusion across the continent,” said Dioum.

Commenting on his appointment, Akinci said “I feel honoured and very excited to join MTN family and ayoba. I believe in the digital vision for Africa driven by MTN and I am confident that, with this great team, we will build the best communication platform and super app of Africa.” At the end of March 2021, MTN had 5.3 million monthly active ayoba users across 20 markets and a plan to grow this to 100 million in 2025. We aim to capture more than 10% of the gross merchandise value of the digital economy in our footprint as we move beyond the traditional telco-led Mobile Money (MoMo) offering with ayoba, which is an OTT (over the top) service that does not require users to be MTN subscribers. We are also targeting 100 million MoMo users by 2025, up from 46.6 million at end-March.

As people everywhere ramp up their usage of instant messaging, more and more are choosing ayoba. MTN Group is proud to partner with this unique instant messaging platform localised for the needs of consumers across Africa.

Launched in 2019 to improve access to affordable communications, ayoba is active in 17 MTN markets, and is also available to download onto Android smartphones in numerous other markets from Google Play and via the ayoba website www.ayoba.me as an over-the-top (OTT) offering.

ayoba is focused on protecting users’ privacy and security:  it is not possible for messages in the app to be read by anyone else or to be shared with any third parties, including MTN. The app features peer-to-peer private messaging which is end-to-end encrypted; ayoba treats data with the utmost care and respect in line with its privacy policy.

All the content available on ayoba channels is curated and reviewed to ensure that its 100% family friendly and safe for younger users. A team of editors checks every post on ayoba content channels before it goes live across over 100 content channels and 120 games.

ayoba has also recently launched an in-app assistant, Aya, to guide new users on how to use the instant messaging app. Aya appears automatically in the app and can run a variety of interactive tutorials for key features within ayoba.

ayoba users can send and receive encrypted messages, share photos, videos, files, voice notes and even their location, and can also subscribe to live channels. Localised content is available through these channels that aim to entertain, educate and empower communities.

Since 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the world, ayoba’s daily lifeline data allocations on MTN’s networks in most markets allowed users free connections with family and provided them with zero-rated access to credible information through special COVID-19 channels.

10 Reasons To Use ayoba:

  1. FREE TO USE: ayoba is free to use. You need data to send messages and files to your contacts, but if you are on the MTN network, you will get free data every day to use the app.
  2. CHAT NOW: Instantly send and receive text and voice messages with any of your contacts.
  3. SECURE: End-to-end encryption means that messages in a conversation cannot be read by anyone else.
  4. QUICK CONNECT: Use your existing address book to quickly and easily connect you with your contacts.
  5. CHAT WITH EVERYONE: Send SMS text messages with anyone in your contact list, regardless of whether they’ve installed ayoba or not.  If the contact to whom you send a message does not have the app, the message will be delivered by SMS.  That contact can then respond by SMS and the response will come back into your app.  This is a unique technology.
  6. GROUP CHAT: The more the merrier. Set up group chats to easily communicate with friends and family in a single chat.
  7. SHARING IS CARING: Share videos, images, audio, and other files with your contacts.
  8. LET’S MEET: Share your real-time location with your ayoba contacts.
  9. CHANNELS: Consume all content across various categories ranging from news, sports, music to entertainment and much more, all within the ayoba app.  We have over 30 content channels live in Nigeria including Pulse for entertainment and the MTN YelloStar competition.
  10. LISTEN AND PLAY: We have a free music service in the app so you can listen to trending songs on our fantastic playlists.  We also have games that you can play, such as BattleShip, Pinball, Solitaire and more.  New content is added every day.

The app supports over 20 local languages spoken across MTN’s markets, including isiZulu, isiXhosa, Pidgin, Yoruba, Swahili, Hausa, French, Arabic, Portuguese, and English. At the end of June 2020, ayoba had two million active users.

In November 2020, ayoba was named the ‘Best Mobile App of the Year’ at the Africa Digital Awards 2020, acknowledging Africa’s first super-app, which offers users free instant messaging, mobile commerce and interactive entertainment.

MTN Group today announced that its instant messaging platform, ayoba has reached 1 million monthly active users. ayoba is an advanced communications application localised for African and Middle East consumer needs, under an independent Over the Top (OTT) brand with unique features for MTN customers. The app supports many local languages spoken across the MTN markets including isiZulu, isiXhosa, Pidgin, Yoruba, Swahili, Hausa, French and English.

MTN, together with its partners, is driven to improve access to affordable communications to ensure that people in its markets can reap the social, economic and developmental dividends of being online. ayoba underscores this goal to bring more people into the digital world by providing them with affordable and simplified digital communication services.

Commenting on the milestone, MTN Group President and CEO, Rob Shuter said, “We believe that our customers in Africa and the Middle East deserve a communication platform that expresses our unique voice, honours our rich identity through local languages, and addresses our customers’ specific needs and challenges by offering a data-included offering for MTN users, Mobile Money transfers (coming soon) and locally relevant content via channels.”

The platform which was launched earlier this year is now operational in 8 MTN markets, namely: Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo Brazzaville, Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Afghanistan and South Africa. ayoba is also available across multiple markets on the Google Play Store and via the ayoba website www.ayoba.me as an OTT offering.

As part of continuous efforts to enhance its offerings, ayoba will be adding more features in the future. “ayoba is also working on building an open digital platform that will enable third-party innovation. This will ensure that we offer a rich diversified experience on the platform, enabling us to deliver more value to our users, empower local developers and create local experiences that are optimised for local communities,” explains David Gilarranz, CEO MTN Digital.

Some of ayoba’s key features and offerings are:

Gilarranz adds that in addition to the number of exciting innovations on the cards, ayoba plans to expand to the rest of MTN’s markets, and other territories across the globe. Before the end of the year, ayoba will go live in Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Benin and Rwanda.

MTN Group today announces the appointment of Yolanda Cuba as Group Chief Digital and Fintech Officer. Yolanda will join the MTN Group Executive Committee reporting to the Group CEO Rob Shuter. In this role Yolanda will lead the Group’s strategic expansion of its financial services and digital solutions efforts and transformation into a digital operator.

Yolanda brings extensive telecommunications and leadership experience to MTN Group. She joins MTN Group from Vodacom, where she served as Chief Officer of Strategy and M&A. She was previously the CEO of Vodafone Ghana for a three-year period, a role that saw her named Telecom CEO of the Year in 2018.

“This role gives me the opportunity to drive digital innovation and financial inclusion across the Group’s vast footprint. I’m really looking forward to the new challenge and being part of the MTN leadership team”, said Yolanda.

Rob Shuter said, “We are very pleased to bring an executive of Yolanda’s calibre into MTN Group. Yolanda is a highly qualified and experienced executive, with a unique combination of operational telecommunications experience as well as finance, financial services and digital skills. I am confident that Yolanda’s leadership will place us in good stead as we intensify our efforts to build a digital ecosystem and scale our fintech offering across our markets”.

Under Yolanda’s leadership, MTN will continue to progressively grow the fintech and digital opportunities in Africa as we see these areas as major drivers of our BRIGHT growth strategy. Yolanda’s start date will be communicated in due course.