Cedric Yanou: « We have been at the forefront of the digital transformation of major companies over the last decade »

Cédric Yanou
Cédric Yanou

Cedric Yanou works as a Chief Commercial Officer for Maviance PLC, focusing on strategic business partnerships and ventures, Key Account acquisition and management, customer relationship as alwas . He has vast experience working for international multi-nationals including Schlumberger in Norway and USA before returning to Cameroon to work as a business developer and Project Manager with Biopharma, deputy CEO of EASY RIDE and the Managing Director of the Cameroon subsidiary of the French company HEETCH. He is also a successful entrepreneur committed to contribute to the development of the Cameroonian start-up ecosystem through the leading incubator that he co-founded in Douala, where he trains and coaches young entrepreneurs in growth hacking and project management. He holds an MSc Engineering from the Technical University of Clausthal – Germany and has specialized in business development independently of the industry.

 

Congratulations on 10 years of existence, Maviance PLc has dedicated over 10 years to offering value added services in tech and finance to companies and government in Cameroon and its borders. What is the strategy your team has adopted to stay consistent over the last decade?

Our commitment has always been to provide ACCESS to digital finance products by leveraging on technology and focusing on innovation. Our message and positioning were constant throughout the journey, and has started to resonate with our target audience who came to discover and appreciate our innovative technology and our drive to foster financial inclusion.

The fintech Market in Cameroon was valued at of US$3,388.00m in 2022 according to statista, it is still growing and expanding with various handicaps that strain its growth. What have been your greatest challenges and how have you been able to overcome them?

Our greatest challenge has certainly been the timing. We started this journey in 2012, too early for many of our customers back then. Digital Transformation was not a topic, though that was all Maviance is and ahas always been about, particularly when it is Digitalizing Payments, Maviance is your best Partner.

Maviance offers solutions such as Smobilpay, what is the value that this solution provides for financial institutions?

Maviance is typically referred to be a FINTECH. At Maviance, we prefer to call ourselves aggregators. It is important for us, that our customers understand in a heart bit who we are, what we do and the value we can bring to their business. So, we are services or Billers Aggregator – we have engineered a technological vehicle to speed-up business development for our customer through digital distribution, on one hand. On another hand, we operate and develop a massive distribution network online and physical (today big of 7,000+ agents nationwide) that distribute all the products available on our platform. So, if you wish to launch a service in Cameroon today, you can be live and distributed by 7,000 agents within a couple of weeks. We aim to grow the distribution network to 50,000 by the end 2024. Payment Aggregator – we are one stop shop for all companies that are interested to accept payments via mobile money. We aggregate all payment systems available in the market and all our customers to be live with their collection/payment service within a couple of days.

One of Maviance PLC greatest perks is its coverage which leads to a large customer database. How were you able to communicate to the potential customers considering the low internet penetration rate and tech literacy rate in Cameroon over the last 10 years ?

What is important here is to understand the problems of our customers. They all wish to make it easy to their customers to have access to their services. And that’s what Maviance is all about. We make it easy for them to digitally distribute their product, hence achieve a rewarding improved customer experience with the service. We have proudly done so with ENEO where we successfully digitalize the payment of electricity bills thereby improving the access to a point of sale where a citizen can pay for their bills. We achieved a similar satisfaction with SABC. Today, SABC customers can proudly make their purchase from the comfort of their home, as we have connected SABC to all the major banks in the country.

Maviance PLC offers solutions to clientele focused in industries such as banking and Telecommunication, are there any aspirations in reaching new markets such as health and insurance ?#

We definitely are. FMCGs are a major focus for us. We do understand their challenges and have been addressing them over the last couple of years. We have now developed a network and solutions to serve the industry. As Digital Transformation but more importantly, Digital Payments is becoming a major topic, we will continue to expand our wings to support different business independently of their industries to ensure they meet their objectives.

What should we expect from Maviance PLC in the next 5 years?

Maviance aims to be the partner of choice for the State and Corporate world when we talk about securing company income, digitalizing payments and facilitating financial transactions. We are committed to continuing on this journey of innovation and change management in what was believed to be impossible to be done by a Cameroonian group. We have been at the forefront of the digital transformation of major companies over the last decade. We will continue to innovate and engineer better and more affordable technologies for SMEs and startups. Furthermore, we will continue our expansion into the CEMAC region to support the expansion of our customers into new territories and markets.

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