Huawei Supports Evolution of Banking in Myanmar
[Yangon, Myanmar, 15 October, 2020] – On 13th October 2020, Huawei hosted a seminar named “Thriving Digitally into A Mobile Future” from New Value Together which is one of the themes of HUAWEI CONNECT 2020. The seminar was designed to share the proof that Huawei has been performing as a trusted partner in exploring new profits from innovative financial solutions for global Financial Services Industry (FSI) customers, and maintaining a strong relationship with them to create new value together, regardless of changes in external environment due to the outbreak of COVID-19.
In this year, the seminar was opened with the speech from Mr. Chen Guo, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) - Managing Director of Platinion Greater China under “Mobile Money Innovation” topic, and later followed by Mr. Michael B. Denoma, KBZ – Chief Executive Officer with “The Early Stirrings of A Banking (R) Evolution”. According to the agenda, Mr. Chen Kun Te, Huawei – Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Global Financial Services Business Unit, EBG delivered the closing speech regarding the topic “Mobile-First Strategy Drives Digital Transformation of Banks”.
With the pandemic’s unparalleled disruption across the world, all industries have been impacted. With so many people staying home, FSI companies must still provide essential services to customers. Huawei has found that many financial institutions have made good progress with digital technologies and capabilities to cope with the epidemic and its challenges. Along with the commitment to build a robust ecosystem with global partners and provide them with innovative solutions to help customers accelerate digital transformation, Huawei has been trying to construct a comprehensive ecosystem and provide more services with Huawei’s fast expanding cloud services around the world.
In Myanmar, Huawei has cooperated with KBZ Bank to launch KBZPay and within 18 months after MOU agreement, the app successfully grew their service to six million registered users, more than 1000 partners, and more than 290,000 merchants. KBZPay transaction value has reached more than $7 billion.
Mr. Michael explained fruitful achievements from KBZ partnership with Huawei and shared his opinion strategic thinking “Back in 2018, Myanmar had the lowest penetration rate of branches, ATMs and less than 40% of adults have bank accounts. However, the penetration rate of mobile phones was nearly 100%. Myanmar became one lowest cost per data GB in the world and urban download per capita are double to that of Singapore. With these advantages, We planned to setup a new innovative data driven ML and AI service to improve the banking sector, a world class mobile wallet with instant real time 24/7 payment and useful functions – mobile, paperless, full-KYC and biometric. That’s why we decided to cooperate with a world leading integrated solutions provider, Huawei and the outcome was overwhelmingly great.
KBZ Bank had cooperated with Huawei since 2018 to provide an inclusive digital financial ecosystem, which is now known as “KBZPay”, for Myanmar citizens across the country to greater access to finance and improve their quality of life through banking. Within two years, the installation rate of the app becomes 6 million which is the double amount of customer base, and the monthly transaction rate increases over USD 1 billion. In order to cover the quantity of users and arrange over 200 million transactions, KBZ deployed more agents.
