By Simon Kaheru
The long and short of it is that when we hear that Mobile Money has been stolen or mis-placed, we will immediately be worried that the entire system isn’t safe.
The thread on the forum began with the question, “How safe is my MTN Mobile Money?” posed by a user who had overshot his daily transaction allowance by crossing the Ushs. 5million mark. His account was ‘suspended’ he said, and he wasn’t sure if the money would still be accessible.
The worried responses from forum members came in fast and thick until I sought an explanation from Richard Mwami, Head of MTN Mobile Money & Public Access, who kicked off with the obvious assurances.
“Mobile Money is very safe. The service is seated on a rugged banking platform and the Bank Of Uganda (BOU) is officially happy with what we have in place.”
I pressed him to say much more, though he couldn’t go into the level of detail I wanted:
“The limits issue is a recommendation from BOU to mitigate the risk of money laundering. For that reason there are daily limits to every customer profile we have. Still, in an offer of good hope to our customers, we have started on the process to get the vendor to allow customers with balances over the limit to transact within the daily limit. This should serve the customers much better.”
So suspensions might not remain the rote if one went over the limit, but users have to appreciate that limits are limits – and other responses on the forum supported this position.
Responding to the juxtaposition of MTN Mobile Money limits to the limits most bank ATMs operate with, Scy-Fy Technologies’ Revence Kalibwani said,
“They (ATMs) do (have daily transaction limits), with the addition that they give more and better information about what is going on. In fact, they may not let you proceed if the amounts would transgress certain limits (rather than letting you proceed and then sitting on your stash).”
Revence however qualified his statement further with,
“The system does/did not communicate well, and that is really the problem here, I think. (Things that carry heavy emotion with them, like cash transactions, are too important to be left to programmers. Programmers communicate poorly, in the rare case that they even bother to communicate. This is a communication problem. They don’t teach those in programming school.)”
Always irreverent (no pun intended on his name) Revence highlighted a key issue with technology that causes caustic (no pun there, I trust?) reactions many a time: systems versus real life.
A customer who chooses to use mobile money for its ‘convenience’ could mentally translate convenience to mean “do what you want when you want to” but that is rarely the case.
The customer who raised the initial complaint was clearly out of order as far as the regulations of Mobile Money were concerned.
Which helps highlight the key issue that faces many customers who choose not to face it: Terms & Conditions.
One of these conditions, which makes absolute sense to any ordinary person, reads, “Although we will try to ensure that you are able to make full use of the Network to access MOBILE MONEY Services within the coverage area, we do not guarantee that the MOBILE MONEY Services will be available at all times and we will not be responsible or liable for any loss whatsoever or howsoever arising as a consequence of any non-availability of the MOBILE MONEY Services. The MOBILE MONEY Services are not fault free and factors including (but not limited to) acts of God, geographical topography, weather conditions, planned maintenance or rectification work on the Network may interfere adversely with the quality and provision of the MOBILE MONEY Services.”
It might be in MTN Uganda’s best interests to make the small print read bigger – but we, the users, must read and understand it.
