After months of interruption that saw Airtel Uganda and MTN Uganda close borders in what seemed like a political war between the two telcos, customers can yet again send and receive money across the two platforms.
If you can recall, we reported about the failed inter-operations between the two companies and pointed out that the failure was significant if you have tried sending money from Airtel to MTN Uganda and vice versa. Here, you could get error messages such as “The number you are sending to is not active” or “invalid code”.
We pointed out that the failure was a result of the then ongoing mobile money promotions that pushed customers to send money on-net at reduced costs. The promos, Sukuma Cash and MoMo Nyabo at Airtel and MTN respectively, have now ended and signs indicate that the inter-operations are now back up.
Airtel Uganda has issued a statement on the same informing its customers on the availability of the service.
At the time of the failure, similar complaints had been raised by Airtel Money app and myMTN app users who suggested failure to access mobile money services through the apps.
Airtel has since then launched its new My Airtel app, which we are reviewing soon, and this is making it easier to make transactions without having to recall the USSD codes to use.
The inter-operability failure affected Airtel and MTN customers
Much as there were promos that let customers send money at much reduced costs to others on the same network, it became very expensive to exchange money between people on varying networks.
For instance, in the past, to send UGX 10,000 from Airtel Uganda to MTN Uganda, you incurred about UGX 2,000 charged for the transaction – totaling to UGX 12,000. However, during the failed inter-operations, the Airtel customer had to make a withdraw of the UGX 10,000 in addition to incurring taxes, after which they had to make a deposit on their MTN number and then send the money to the destined number.
