VIVA entered the Bahraini Telecommunication market in 2010 with a vision to transform the national telecommunications landscape. Within 2 years from launch, we grew very quickly from being the third entrant in a highly saturated market into the mobile market share leader. While part of our success lies in the continued investment in latest technologies, our key focus has always been to differentiate by better understanding customer needs and offer services that are unique, better and faster.

And it’s this understanding of customer needs – both in the present, but more importantly for the future – that we believe will lead to a transformation in the way our industry operates, as well as laying the foundations of our own future growth and success.

At the onset, it is clear to see that the industry’s business model is changing, with some services becoming commoditized (voice and SMS) and data monetization marginalized by Over the Top (OTT) players that are in some cases superior to the ones that Telecommunication operators have offered. This is apparent by the massive popularity of Net ix and WhatsApp to name a few.

On a parallel note, we witnessed companies, which now have some of the largest market caps globally, evolve from pure play companies; companies with a single dominant product; to companies that excel at developing ecosystems. We don’t need to look too far back to Google and Apple, as examples, to understand this change. Google’s origin back in 1998 was rooted in search, which it was able to monetize. Today though they offer an ecosystem of over 60 products, from applications to hardware, creating a linked environment for its customers covering home, business, entertainment and lifestyle with agship products such as Android, YouTube, Google Maps and Google+, and to a large degree all complementing the search ecosystem and hence its ability to monetize the customer further. Apple which had its start with the Mac and originally was only positioned as a niche product company only. Then it disrupted the music business with their iTunes/iPod, quickly followed with the iPhone, iPad, Touch and Watch with supporting services such as TV, Apple Pay, iCloud and Home to offer a portfolio of connected services and products, and to a large degree centered around the ecosystem of the evolving digital lifestyle of the consumer and its ability to monetize the customer’s need transformation.

There are clear lessons here for our own organization, Mr. Ulaiyan Al Wetaid, Chief Executive Of cer notes. As they evolved, our own business model evolved as well, from a pure play model to an eco-system play. Our ecosystem journey started by us expanding beyond the Telecom pure play services (voice and data) and offering eco-system services around the handset; device nancing, trade-in, handset insurance and lifetime handset proposition. However moving forward such an ecosystem is not wide or disruptive enough. In 2018, we expanded that eco-system and we disrupted the Bahraini market by addressing the customer’s Financial Service needs.

Our roadmap of Mobile Financial Services targets both the banked and unbanked segments and includes mobile wallets, international remittance payments, peer to peer payment, consumer nancing and lending to name a few, notes Karim Tabbouche, Chief Commercial Of cer.

We believe that VIVA Bahrain has the right to win in such a transition as it already has a deep understanding of the customer needs and business and technical capabilities that allow it to execute on such expansion, capabilities that it had developed both organically and through a partnership model.

Bahrain is ready for such a change. Bahrain’s telecommunications market was the rst in the Middle East to launch internet services in 1995, and the rst in the GCC region to liberalise and open up its ICT sector to investment. Today, it’s the most ICT developed country in the Middle East, ranked 31st out of 176 countries on the 2017 Global ICT Development Index, and 1st in the GCC. This is all thanks to a liberal government policy, forward-looking regulator and substantial infrastructure investments made by telecom players such as ourselves.

Maintaining this level of progress requires Bahrain to continue to push further its policy and regulatory frameworks to support such change. The Bahrain 4th National Telecom Plan (NTP 2016) set out to create a more competitive telecommunications environment, and sets the rights framework to promote competition. Just like NTP net neutrality policy statements put out a forward position advocating the customer rst philosophy and accepting its impact on the Telecommunication sector, a similar open policy statement within the nancial sector is key to promote further innovation in the nancial sector.

Since its launch, VIVA Bahrain has been at the forefront of innovation and customer experience. With the launch of our Mobile Financial Services, we look forward to continuing being Bahrain’s Favorite Network, and to better serve our customer’s nancial services needs as well.