The democratization of the digital lifestyle

Ravinder Takkar, recently appointed CEO of Vodafone Romania, tells Business Review how he sees the democratization of the digital lifestyle of local consumers and all-size businesses, its transformational power and achieving simplicity as a key to successful leadership in the telecom industry.

Anca Ionita

What is the focus of Vodafone’s future strategy?

Bringing as many Romanians into the new digital lifestyle, and that starts by connecting them to the Internet and then helping increase their productivity, which has a direct impact on GDP. There are opportunities to bring innovation to the market, which I’d classify separately. One is around enterprise corporate customers, where we are a market leader. We have done clever
things with some enterprise customers, but the key is to scale them up to more organizations, including small businesses, where we can add value and bring more productivity.

There are more innovations in the pipeline, certainly in a new area like machine- to-machine, properly known as the Internet of things. We are in the early stages, but those opportunities are transformational for business environments, changing the way some bricksand- mortar firms are run. Eventually they will reach consumers, which is a second focus for us.

The third thing is a leap of faith, an experiment. It’s something we’ve had a good history with in other countries and we want to bring to Romania – a step toward financial services. We recently launched a product called m-pesa, which was successful on other markets. On paper, our demographic and social information on Romania seems conducive to such a product. It’s a bit tangential to our core business, but has a nice affinity with our products. It will take time to build. You need to build confidence in the service, consumers need time to understand what are we offering, but even from a regulatory perspective, since it’s a financial service.

We are a telecom company, and we have to build regulator confidence that we can provide the service. We are working with them closely as the product is developed. In a place like Kenya, where we launched the service and it’s very popular, we’ve seen creative things, innovations that consumers developed based on our core platform, which, frankly, we were not expecting, such as NGOs using m-pesa for fundraising! This is the kind of innovation I’m talking about. We’ve launched m-pesa in Afghanistan and the US military wanted to pay the salaries of their personnel there on m-pesa. The Afghan government, for example, switched to paying government employees on mpesa; it’s safe and secure in that environment.

It doesn’t require a sophisticated device – the cheapest mobile phone is enough. It works on SMS. The service is there for everybody, that’s the beauty of it.

How does it actually work?

The m-pesa platform is the actual money platform, where people register, get accounts, and transfers are made. It’s a very robust, financial services platform connected to a bank. Since we are not a bank – we don’t have an e-money or banking license – the money itself is with a bank, 100 percent protected. Consumers cannot lose their money. We are an e-money operator licensed by the National Bank, and the bank we are working with here is Raiffeisen. We have to build a distribution network to make the service available to as many people as we can, not only in Vodafone stores and dealers, but in other retail chains. The whole idea is convenience and confidence: I’m not far away from my money and if I want it back, I can go down the street and get it.

The digitalization of companies is the next big challenge for the local business environment. Where would you be in this game?

We have a role to play, along with IT firms and the government. We are playing a very central part as the communication and connectivity provider, the starting point for digitalization and improvement of these companies’ infrastructure. There are synergies between us and some IT firms around solutions we can bring together. Other things can happen in infrastructure, such as smartmetering, a project the government can start to energize today.

This is why I’m excited about bringing more to enterprises, because there are plenty of opportunities to transform and digitalize businesses. One of the innovations that came from m-pesa in Kenya is a micro-financing platform that runs on the platform – it is very sucsuccessful. Can m-pesa do it? It can and it is. There are venture capitalists with a lot of money and large companies with access to it. But when you get down to smaller businesses and individual entrepreneurs in rural areas, that doesn’t exist. Our colleagues in Kenya have used this platform to say “I have EUR 500 extra that I can lend to entrepreneurs.” There is no innovation limitation on this platform; it depends on the creativity of those who use it.

Do you have plans to launch a TV service in the near future?

Connecting people is not enough. Real change starts when people use applications and services. So our vision is to bring people relevant content, whether music, sport or videos, and letting them decide how to use it, as opposed to saying, “I just want to be another TV player.”

TV is important in the Romanian market, no question, but the current TV format – predominantly linear, sitting in front of a not very smart TV box – while interesting to consumers, is not that interesting for our business, which is digitalizing people’s lives. If you mix in other devices, tablets, smartphone screens, then it becomes interesting. Is it really TV? I’m not sure.

What is your definition of leadership?

Everything we do, in a complex world, is about the employees. Hire the best people, thereby creating the best foundation for your business, and then let the machine run, empower employees, give them time, enthusiasm, tools, money, things that they can use to compete it’s difficult to be successful. As a leader you have to take personal responsibility for making sure the environment you are creating is conducive to your business. At Vodafone we have this concept: speed – simplicity – trust.

Which is a paradox. How can such a complex business be simple?

This is where leadership comes in. Simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve.Exposing complexity is very easy. This is my job, to make complex things simple. Don’t underestimate it! It is hard work, but with huge value. Our customers don’t buy complexity, they buy simplicity.

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