In Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar and Senegal, users will need to uninstall the Yup app on their smartphones and computers. Societe Generale’s electronic money portfolio is coming to an end following, overall, five years of activity on the continent. This news, which has not (yet) been the subject of a press release from the French banking group, was revealed via an internal note to the Yup teams in the seven African markets concerned.
The concerted decision comes from the fact that ” the service has failed to create a viable model and the market prospects do not allow us to envisage its continuation […] in all geographies where [il] was deployed, explains Nicolas Pichou, general manager of the Cameroonian subsidiary of SocGen in the internal note consulted by the press.
Perceived as a real innovation within the banking giant which intended to find its way into the effervescent mobile money sector in Africa, Yup was also SocGen’s cornerstone in the building of financial inclusion on the continent. But the rise of mobile money companies in these markets seems to have weighed on the momentum initiated by SocGen in these markets where Yup had 2.1 million subscribers at the end of 2020. Nothing filters for the moment as to the fate of employees of the bank assigned to this service.