Organisational Design to Succeed in Mobile Money

This paper provides findings from interviews with senior executives to understand success factors and pitfalls in the organizational design of mobile money deployments. It addresses organizational principles relevant to both top executives and the mobile money team. The interviews reveal that best practice in organizational design for the mobile money industry has begun to emerge. Different deployments, across different geographies and corporate cultures, have independently arrived at similar conclusions on how to approach resourcing a mobile money team, including:

• Complexity of the mobile money business necessitates a degree of organizational commitment not typically required by other value added services (VAS) or supplemental products;
• It is advisable to create an independent mobile financial service business unit, reporting to the CEO or CCO, rather than manage mobile money within the VAS or Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) sales and distribution teams;
• Creating a dedicated sales and distribution team for mobile money is recommended, rather than leveraging the GSM sales and distribution team;
• Key performance indicators must be in place for the mobile money team and other senior executives;
• Organizational design must keep pace with the evolution of a mobile money program.