Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mall for Africa CEO Chris Folayan (Part 3)

Chris Folayan: Most of the financial transactions right now are based on purchasing of items. In Nigeria, for example, you can buy your airplane tickets on your mobile device. You also have new applications out there using which you can hail a taxi – something like Uber. Mobile payment is something that’s picking up. It hasn’t exploded as most people would have thought. It’s pretty much because Africa is still trying to get a grasp of the change, and it’s going to take a generation or two for that change to happen. Africa has always been a cash-based society, so you, like most third-world countries, are changing from cash-based society to electronic-based. It is taking some time to happen, but it is happening.

I’ll give you one example. In the US, for example, I can’t transfer money instantly from a Wells Fargo account to a Bank of America account on my cellphone. But in Nigeria and many African countries, you can transfer money instantly from Euro bank accounts with one bank to another account with another bank. It takes about a second. I’ll be transferring from a Wells Fargo, in essence, to a Bank of America and it will take a second to do so. There are applications like that.

The banking sector has embraced e-transactions where people now can go in and talk to a company and say, “I want to purchase that car.” They will, on their cellphone, transfer the money to the dealership and now the dealership can confirm that they have the funds. You do have that taking place in Nigeria and other Africa countries. That’s part of the way Africa is embracing mobile and mobile transactions.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the consumer segment is definitely vastly on mobile. Is the prosumer segment also on mobile or is there more of a PC trend there?

Chris Folayan: I think it’s both. I really think the push is with both. The market is basically stating, “This is where we’re going. This is the trend.” Everything is moving towards mobile transactions and mobile communications. Everyone is jumping in on that bandwagon and getting in on the action, so to say, because that is the future and that is where we’re going.

Sramana Mitra: It’s interesting because in the US, iPad sales are dropping. For a while, iPads were very popular. Now people are looking for a combination of iPad and laptop. The phone screen is becoming larger and the tablet is starting to fuse into a combination of laptop and tablet usage model. I’m curious on how mobility is unfolding on the African continent.

Chris Folayan: Trends actually pick up more in Africa. The trends in Africa actually end up morphing into trends everywhere else. You can look at the adoption rate in Africa and pretty much say that this is going to happen across the board. You saw Blackberry dying in Africa a long time ago before it died here. You see things like the tablet were picking up in Africa before. It was really huge here.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mall for Africa CEO Chris Folayan
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