Vodafone Fiji: Digitally Connecting People in the Pacific
Vodafone Fiji is a 100% locally owned entity that is continually committed to enhancing mobile connectivity for the people of Fiji. First founded in 1994, the organisation explores new boundaries within the world of telecommunications to offer all Fijians the opportunity to engage with the next era of mobile innovation.
Deepak Baran, Vodafone Fiji’s Head of Financial Technology, oversees the strategic direction of the company's financial technology initiatives. Having been with Vodafone Fiji for over a decade, he is well-versed in a range of verticals on offer, including transit, mobile and value-added services the organisation offers to customers – most of which include financial technology.
“We also do strategy formulation and change management, which is very critical,” he says. “We are exploring developments in other nations and global trends, aiming to draw insights and apply those lessons here in Fiji.”
Broadening financial inclusion in Fiji
Vodafone Fiji is collaborating with various technology providers operating within the financial technology (fintech) sector. It partners with notable payment networks including the likes of Visa and MasterCard in order to boost its fintech offerings.
The organisation is working across these key emerging markets in order to boost its presence in Fiji, but also to offer greater accessibility to the nation’s people. Through its flagship platform, M-PAiSA, it already provides a comprehensive range of digital payment services.
“We try to get the learnings from these people and from what's happening around the globe to implement it here in Fiji,” Deepak explains. “Within M-PAiSA, customers can perform peer-to-peer transactions, money transfers, settle utility bills and pay for goods and services at merchants. They’re also able to access some of our co-services, which includes topping up their mobile phones.”
Services like this are ultimately designed by Vodafone Fiji to close the digital divide and improve accessibility for underserved communities within Fiji. The company launched its QR Pay offerings several years ago which has already become a huge success across Fiji as it stands to help make payments simple.
“We also serve as a critical enabler for broader financial services. Users or customers can conveniently receive salaries or government welfare disbursements,” Deepak says. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to work with the regulatory authorities to quickly disburse funds to the people through M-PAiSA because they were unable to work.”
One of the unique strengths for M-PAiSA is it's accessible across all types of mobile devices from feature phones to latest smartphones. “It drives inclusiveness,” Deepak explains. “Every Fijian, regardless of their access to technology or traditional banking services, can participate in some kind of digital economy. We are bridging that gap between the digital world and the physical world. And at the end of the day, it drives financial inclusion and empowers individuals both in urban areas and the rural areas in the villages to take control of their finances.”
Protecting customers against financial crime
A significant aspect of Vodafone Fiji’s financial inclusion mission is to offer services and solutions in a safe and responsible way. Specifically, this involves protecting businesses and customers from financial crime, a significant cybersecurity issue that is unfortunately inevitable.
Deepak explains how the organisation is committed to strengthening its financial crime defences via the stringent use of cutting-edge technologies.
“This includes embedding AI within our ecosystem,” he explains. “We use machine learning technologies to detect fraud and prevent real-time payments, which is completed via some of the implementation strategies we have in place to proactively identify any suspicious patterns, mitigate risk and enhance the overall security of digital financial services.”
Vodafone Fiji has also committed itself to maintaining a comprehensive security posture through continuous upgrades of its platform. For instance, its mobile app has undergone significant enhancements to protect its customers, with teams dedicated to continuously ensuring they are aligned with the latest cybersecurity trends.
“As technology evolves, the bad actors evolve as well. So we ensure that we are ahead of the game,” Deepak states. “We also enforce measures like anti-money laundering procedures, which are critical for ensuring regulatory compliance and safeguarding customer information against unauthorised access or fraudulent access.”
In Fiji, the government established an anti-scam task force, with Vodafone Fiji playing a key role. The company actively collaborates to conduct regular risk assessments, identifying emerging threats and vulnerabilities within the fintech sector.
“We also collaborate closely with the Reserve Bank of Fiji, which is the regulatory authority, to align our strategies with national regulations and best practices to stay ahead of evolving financial crime tactics,” Deepak adds. “We raise awareness and promote safe financial practices. For example, keeping customers’ PINs secure, making sure their phones are password protected, things like that.
“We are empowering our customers to protect themselves against potential scams and fraudulent schemes. This helps us build confidence in our product for people to feel confident their funds are secure with us.”
Hawk: The importance of financial crime detection
In order for customers to most effectively protect their financial assets, Vodafone Fiji is eager to advocate for the importance of mobile education. When it comes to fraud, it is vital that customers are aware of the signs and are able to report activity as it is happening so it can be mitigated.
“It's really important to create that awareness. We do it through social media sites like Facebook and TikTok to create that engagement,” Deepak says.
In order to strengthen its financial crime prevention offering, Vodafone Fiji has partnered closely with Hawk, a technology company that helps banks, payment companies and fintechs fight financial crime with AI, machine learning and fraud prevention.
Hawk’s technology increases the effectiveness of financial crime detection by helping financial institutions improve their risk coverage and find more crime, while also improving efficiency. It does this by dramatically reducing false positive alerts by applying fully transparent and auditable machine learning to high volumes of transactions.
Deepak explains: “One of our key strategies was to strengthen the financial crime prevention capabilities, which is also one of the key requirements of the Reserve Bank of Fiji. We need to ensure that we have controls in place to detect fraud in real-time, so that we can proactively stop transactions from happening in the first place.”
With Hawk, Vodafone Fiji has deployed its state-of-the-art anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing technology within M-PAiSA. This enables greater range of functionality for the organisation, whereby it can complete payment screening using the Hawk platform.
“We do transaction monitoring, customer due diligence, customer risk profiling and business risk profiling. It enhances our capability to detect and prevent financial crime in real time and brings a new level of accuracy, transparency and efficiency to detect fraud and complete risk management,” Deepak says.
“It provides reasoning behind each flag alert, which does most of the heavy lifting for our compliance team. Instead of being reactive, we are now proactive.”
Hawk’s technology also helps to safeguard Vodafone Fiji customers’ transactions and ultimately work to mitigate potential risks and maintain integrity within the M-PAiSA ecosystem.
“This collaboration has made us commit further to the people of Fiji and our subscribers, especially the subscribers of M-PAiSA. We are providing a safe and secure and trusted digital financial service to them,” Deepak adds. “We want to enhance their resiliency against sophisticated crime, which allows us to offer confidence to the regulatory authorities as well. We have been able to level up our game in the financial crime area.”
A new era of mobile banking
In addition to Hawk, Vodafone Fiji boasts a range of partners across its ecosystem – including MasterCard Networks. The organisations collaborated to launch a debit card product through MasterCard, making Vodafone Fiji one of the first non-bank organisations in the Pacific region to issue a scheme card.
The success of scheme cards has grown over the past year, with Vodafone Fiji having contributed this cutting-edge technology to better support the people of Fiji.
“The success of this product has exceeded our expectations,” Deepak shares. “Before this, Fijians were finding it challenging or difficult to walk into a banking outlet and sign up for a credit card or debit card. We have now made it really easy for the people of Fiji and our subscribers to sit at home, if you are an existing M-PAiSA app user, to use their phone and register themselves.
“It gives us confidence, with M-PAiSA in Fiji being a local product, as we are able to integrate with a globally recognised payments network like MasterCard. Our customers can now use M-PAiSA funds when they're travelling abroad or making payments online. It's an achievement that we feel really proud of.”
Moving forward, specifically in the fintech sector, Vodafone Fiji is eager to continue expanding its solutions to better serve its customers in the region, but also across the Greater Pacific.
“Our focus is to continue to drive digital transformation and expand our core business, which is telecommunication,” Deepak explains. “We want to improve connectivity and customer experience by further enhancing our M-PAiSA platform and introducing new features such as advanced payment solutions, expanding acceptance and cross-border remittance.”
A key focus as part of this will be to leverage emerging technologies such as AI, with Deepak noting that Vodafone Fiji is already trying to embed AI strategies into its ecosystem so it can be used across the workforce. To do this, he explains, will require a deepening of existing partnerships to better support local communities.
“We can't do everything on our own. We are expanding our relationship with the global technology providers and network providers like MasterCard to build a more integrated financial ecosystem,” he says.
“Harnessing the capabilities of someone like Hawk into our AI ecosystem enables us to better safeguard our customers. At this period, we will see a strong push towards financial inclusion, making digital financial services more accessible to the underserved communities.
“We want to ensure that we contribute meaningfully to our customers. At the end of the day, this impacts the economic development of Fiji and the Pacific region as well.”
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