MTN’s MoMo: MTN Launches Africa’s First AI Service For Mobile Money

MTN is bringing artificial intelligence (AI) into its Mobile Money (MoMo) service and has launched what it is calling Africa’s first Mobile Money chatbot.

MTN’s MoMo is an artificially intelligent mobile money assistant, it is basically a chatbot. With the chatbot, customers can engage with MTN MoMo services. These services include payments on various social media platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and via SMS. According to reports, MTN plans to add the service overtime in MTN’s own newly released advanced instant messaging service “Ayoba”.

The chatbot (MoMo) is an artificial intelligence guide that assists users to navigate MTN’s MoMo services and provide other useful information.  The new service is an innovation that leverages messaging and artificial intelligence to drive customer engagement and enhance their MTN MoMo experience.

Photo: MTN Group president and CEO Rob Shuter.

“We are passionate about bringing the power of our mobile money solutions to more than 60 million customers across Africa over the next few years. Harnessing modern technologies like artificial intelligence can improve in scale, how MTN interacts with customers, enabling them to reach us anytime and anywhere, through a variety of channels including social networks and messaging applications. We can also harness the power of artificial intelligence to provide our customers with the right answers to their questions at the right time,” said Rob Shuter, President and CEO at MTN Group.

“We are committed to improving financial inclusion with a range of solutions aimed at addressing the needs of various market segments. While MTN has made great strides in these areas, we will continue working to deliver our vision for MTN to become one of the largest Fintech players across our footprint,” concluded Shuter.

Financial services has been one industry that has taken to using AI, especially chatbots. This is likely because the financial services industry, by nature, not only deals with lots of data but well structured data in most cases. Data, as you might guess, is one of the prerequisites for Machine Learning and AI.

MTN’s MoMo chatbot went live first in Ivory Coast. The telecom brand shared plans to roll out the chatbot across MTN’s MoMo footprint in the next few months.