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RUSLAN MURSALZADE: Hello, everyone, my name is Ruslan.
And today I'm joined by Oluseye Farodoye, the group
senior manager and head of services at MTN Group.
He's going to be talking a little bit
about their digital transformation journey
with API first approach.
Thank you for joining us, Oluseye.
OLUSEYE FARODOYE: Thanks, Ruslan.
Thanks for having me.
I'm excited to share our journey--
our digital transformation journey
and how we're leveraging the power of APIs
to power our new business models.
A little bit about MTN.
MTN is an emerging market telecoms operator,
and we operate out of 21 countries within Africa
and the Middle East.
And we are the forefront of digital transformation
within the regions in which we operate.
RUSLAN MURSALZADE: That's great, Oluseye.
I know you're a champion of APIs,
so tell us a little bit about what
role do APIs play in MTN Group's digital transformation
strategy.
OLUSEYE FARODOYE: So overall at MTN, we
believe that in order to realize exponential growth,
we have to transform ourselves from a one-sided business
into a multi-sided platform.
And APIs play at the very core of that vision
and of that objective by allowing
us to create new avenues, to create value,
and to also identify and capture new sources of revenue.
RUSLAN MURSALZADE: And I believe you're managing those APIs
with Google Cloud's Apigee.
So tell us a little bit about how
Apigee is helping you achieve your digital transformation
goals.
OLUSEYE FARODOYE: So overall in MTN,
our digital transformation program, which
is called Oxygen, looks at transforming MTN from a, not
just one internal perspective, but also
with external interactions with our stakeholders
and other businesses within the ecosystem.
And Apigee has played a core part
in transforming the way we do business
and transforming the way we think about interactions
with stakeholders and with other entities within the ecosystem,
largely because of the many capabilities that
come with Apigee that allow us to be able to roll out
new features and components and feature sets really quickly.
RUSLAN MURSALZADE: And what type of business impact
are you seeing so far with this strategy?
OLUSEYE FARODOYE: Thanks again.
We've seen quite a number of really impressive impacts
business-wise, but I'll just take a few of them.
One of them is speed.
We're now able to deliver new features
and create new services in about a quarter of the time
it used to take us before.
Right now we're also able to secure
the interactions between MTN and entities, especially
with features like Apigee Sense.
We can monitor and manage this traffic in real time and act
on them.
And overall we also seeing a very big jump
in operational efficiency.
For example, last year we processed close
to a billion API calls and we had
to-- we did this with pretty much same investment in Apigee
that we had in 2019.
RUSLAN MURSALZADE: That's great to hear, Oluseye.
Tell us a little bit about your monetization strategy
with APIs.
Which APIs are you monetizing, and how are you
identifying opportunities for new business models with APIs?
OLUSEYE FARODOYE: So generally we
took a fairly unorthodox approach to monetizing APIs
by creating a new entity to tackle the overall API
marketplace or API monetization challenge within Africa.
And that's called Chenosis.
You can find it on chenosis.io.
And-- but what we've seen in the market
is there's interest for APIs in payments,
specifically mobile money, where there's
a lot of interest for APIs around KIOC, a lot of interest
for APIs around identity and verification,
largely driven by the fact that a lot of Africans
are either underbanked or unbanked.
And what Chenosis aims to do is to consolidate this and sort of
create an ecosystem within the market
where APIs are easily accessible to the community.
RUSLAN MURSALZADE: That's very inspiring to hear, Oluseye.
So what's next for MTN Group.
Tell us a little bit about what you
hope to accomplish in the next three years.
OLUSEYE FARODOYE: Overall, MTN over the past 27 years
has positioned itself and proven itself
to be a technology leadership organization within Africa
and the Middle East.
And what we aim to achieve in the next one to three years
is to actually position ourself as the platform
business for the region.
And we're doing this by adopting an API-led approach.
We doing this by adopting new ways of thinking.
And because we know and we believe that everyone deserves
the benefits of a modern, connected life,
we are creating new ecosystems and new sources of value.
And we believe that by adopting--
I mean, using APIs and leveraging platforms
like Apigee, we can create new sources of revenue
and create more value.
RUSLAN MURSALZADE: That's very inspiring to hear, Oluseye.
Thank you for joining us today to tell us
a little bit about MTN's API-first digital strategy
with Apigee.
OLUSEYE FARODOYE: Thanks, Ruslan,
and Thanks for having me.
And thank you for allowing me to share our story with you.
RUSLAN MURSALZADE: For those of you
who'd like to learn more about this,
please check out the resources below.
Thank you very much.
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