{Tigo Rwanda has announced a new initiative with 70 Umurenge SACCOS that will avail mobile financial services to more than 77,000 Customers in 20 districts nationwide. Under this partnership, customers with both bank accounts in SACCOS and Tigo cash wallets will find the two platforms fully integrated; customers can now transfer funds from their SACCO accounts to their Tigo Cash wallets and vice versa automatically.}
Commenting on this new partnership, Tigo Rwanda Head of Mobile Financial Services, Faith Chisulo said:“Since their creation, SACCOs have proved to be a great contributor to financial inclusion amongst the Rwandan population especially in rural areas. We believe that by connecting these Saccos to our Tigo Cash system, we will allow these financial institutions to scale up because many of them cannot open branches around the areas they would want to cover. This partnership will increase the number of banked population”.
To access the services, members of the SACCO simply dial *500# , Choose the ‘Banking’ Option, Choose ‘SACCO’ and follow the prompts.
According to Central Bank figures between December 2012 and December 2015, the number of mobile money accounts increased by 432% from 1,440,541 to 7,663,199, the number of transactions using mobile money increased by 659.8% from 22,191,674 to 168,612,455 and the number of agents increased by 1211.7% from 3,085 to 40,467 in the period under review. This development is expected to have increased formal access to financial service between 2012 and 2015 more than what was achieved between 2008 and 2012.
Tigo Rwanda Head of Mobile Financial Services, Faith Chisulo added: “SACCOs are located in some areas that are a bit challenging to some of their customers in terms of access. This new platform will help our customers who live far away from their local SACCO Branch from wasting precious time travelling long distances”.
In addition to this new partnership with Umurenge SACCOs, Tigo has had a similar platform with three local commercial banks namely Access Bank, Kenya Commercial Bank and Bank of Kigali since 2014.
Over $350 million has been transacted through the Tigo Cash system since its inception and over 2.7 million customers use the platform.
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