Groupwide deals

Fundamo recently announced that they concluded a deal with MTN for the deployment of their wallet solution to all 23 country-operations in the group. Progress has been swift with ten countries already deployed and a further five in process. It has been rumoured that other large mobile operator groups are also looking at groupwide deployments of wallet solutions. The question is what makes groupwide deployments different than individual country deployments and what is required to be able to deliver on such deals.

Groupwide deployments are different to individual deployemnts and more complex because of the following reasons:

• Groupwide deployments usually require the incapsulation of some groupwide standards that must be adapted through extensions for individual countries. This is not as easy as it may seem.
• Groupwide collaboration on lessons learned, innovation and also inter-operability must be incorporated in all of the projects. This leads to a lot of project overhead.
• Commercial contracting though centrally based acquiring departments are usually significantly more complex than smaller individual contracts. Because of the size of these deals, suppliers are usually under bigger pressure with more exposure from a liability perspective. Delivery within these types of contractual frameworks are much more onerous on suppliers
• If suppliers can define groupwide blueprints and use economy of scale on these projects, deployments can be quicker and more predictable.

The deployment of Groupwide solutions are significantly more complex, but if done properly can deliver many benefits.