Joan Mwaura, CEO of Oxygen 8 Group, explains how the global pandemic accelerated the transition to online and boosted various digital areas such as billing solutions, transborder payments via M-PESA, etc.

"We are now more online. The best thing about Kenyans is they adapt very fast. Supermarkets and shops that people used to walk into, cross border payments, everything went online. So, we had more people who wanted billing solutions, more people who wanted a solution in terms of payments and customizing their systems whether it is buying, whether it is sending goods, whether it is sending money, they are able to do it themselves. In terms of the billing markets, everything that we were not using M-PESA for has had to be accelerated. The border is the biggest one for us. At the border, people used to pay cash with different currencies. We needed to develop a transborder payment whereby if you are in Kenya you can pay by M-PESA, and the payee in Tanzania receives the payment via Safaricom in Tanzanian shillings. That was big for us. We are hoping that the industry will change. Kenya and Tanzania are easy, and Uganda is getting there, so we hope that this is something we can grow in markets we are already in, like Ghana. It is big on mobile money, so we are looking at whether cross border payments between Ghana and surrounding countries can be done with mobile money. The government can track the payments, there is more accountability, and the money can go directly into the government’s account instead of it going through third parties. The business has grown on the billing side. We used to be on standby in case our help was needed, so we wanted to make sure the system can work on autopilot. What we do now is support and that has reduced our costs, but it has also made us come up with corporate solutions that we would not have thought about if the need had not arisen", says Joan Mwaura.

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