Last Month MTN Uganda Upgraded its mobile money service and as a customer when you hear about an upgrade, you think of new things and better ways to transact via mobile money. Well a lot has changed after the upgrade and I heard a lot of complaints and confusion about Mobile money service after the upgrade which am going to try and clear today .
At the end of last week I decided to tryout the system my self and to get a little feedback from the mobile money agents. I have also talked to MTN Uganda and after my simple investigations, here are some of my learnings about the new upgrades to Mobile Money.
What Has Changed:
Well am not going to waste your time about how mobile money works because you already know that but by now if you have tried to do some transactions like sending and receiving money, you have noticed the names of the sender or the agent will appear with both the transaction request and confirmation. IF you have been using Airtel Uganda maybe this is not new to you but we all know most transactions are on MTN Mobile Money therefore this will take away the mass confusion.
Faster Transactions:
With the Introduction of USSD(*165#) on both the agent and customer ends, customers can now transact very fast. You don’t have to leave the Kiosk without money because you are still waiting for the confirmation to come through to your phone, however and this is very important if you don’t see the authentication which has happened to me, you can dial *165# log into your account with your PIN and approve the transaction.
More Secure:
This is the one confusing bit I have liked about the Upgrade and yes I said confusing, why because it is so good most Agents don’t know about it. I sampled about 5 agents and 2 in 5 didn’t know, that when they initiate the withdraw and the flash notification doesn’t appear, you have to dial *165#. Therefore the next time you want to withdraw and don’t get the flash notification, Dial *165# , you will get a prompt to My Account (Option 10), Then Approvals (Option 1), you will then be prompted for your PIN, after this you will get the flash notification and the rest of the process is similar to the first steps.
Room For Improvement:
I believe MTN is taking measures to make Mobile Money more secure and much faster and give the team a thumbs up on achieving this with the recent upgrade however I still believe Smartphone users should have an app for mobile money and not USSD, I also think what MTN needs now is to reach out to its agents and explain the changes so that my Grand mother doesn’t have to get stranded because some agent is not updated about the upgrade.
I will end here for now, if you have anything to add to the story tweet us @nickle_las and @pctechmagazine on twitter and I will see you in the next one.
