Susie

M-PESA, Executive Head, Vodacom Payment Services

Susie’s degrees are in chemical engineering and she is a chartered engineer. Her career has always been strongly linked to product innovation. She has worked in both R&D and Consumer Marketing for products ranging from washing powder to nuclear fuel. In nine years with Vodafone she has mainly focused upon mobile commerce applications for both developed and emerging economies.

Within Vodafone Group, Susie is one of the creators of the Vodafone Money Transfer service, branded M-PESA in Africa. In 2005 she developed and ran M-PESA as a small pilot in Kenya to test extending the reach of financial services by using mobile phone technology. Upon successful completion of the pilot she redeveloped this simple system to be suitable for national launch whilst recruiting and training the local M-PESA team to run the service. Susie then facilitated the M-PESA launch in Tanzania whilst supporting the ongoing growth in Kenya and developing new services to add to the M-PESA portfolio. M-PESA in East Africa currently has over 10 million customers.

Returning to the UK, Susie built a team in Vodafone Group to provide commercial support to existing M-PESA markets; deliver new and improved functionality to the core M-PESA service; and recruit new potential markets for M-PESA. When she recruited Vodacom in South Africa, they requested that she be seconded to Johannesburg to lead the team launching the service. This is what she is currently doing. Prior to Vodafone she had a number of commercial and technical positions in a wide range of companies including Procter & Gamble, HJ Heinz Co Ltd, and the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

In her spare time Susie is energetic in her exploration of whichever country she finds herself in, plays loud music, reads a lot of books, and enjoys whatever forms of live entertainment are on offer.

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