Charity Chitalu Mwanza: Encouraging an Interoperable and Shared Society in Zambian Fintech Industry

Digital Paygo is a Fintech company that offers shared mobile merchant payment solutions, shared agent banking solutions, tailored digital payments and collective solutions to financial institutions, MNOs and third-party service providers to drive digital payment ecosystem growth. The company aims to facilitate interoperability and eliminate barriers to financial inclusion whilst propagating distribution channels for business growth. This year, the company secured funding from private equity and was selected to be a part of the FinTech4U accelerator program that took place from January to April of 2020.

A Leader with an Inquisitive Mind

Charity Chitalu Mwanza is a technology enthusiast and a business leader with over 22 years of experience, involving roles in digital transformation, payments, system implementation, business development, strategic partnerships in the financial services industry. By combining technology with business acumen, she has had unique experiences of developing and launching digital products that have had both social and economic impact.

Charity is the founding Chief Executive Officer of Digital PayGo. She holds a Master's degree in Business Administration (Herriot-Watt), Diploma in Computer Science, Associate Certificate in Business Analysis from George Washington University, a certified project manager practitioner and holds various  professional qualifications and experience in digital transformation, business strategy development & implementation, information technology, system implementations, project & change management, business analysis and sales management.

Learning from Education and Experience

Charity cites three key experiences or programmes   which molded her into the successful leader she is today. These are:

Database & System Administration: This experience taught Charity to never take anything for granted, to pay attention to the right details, to understand the silver lining between effort and results. It made her understand that managing critical systems comes with a sense of pride and confidence in one's abilities.

Business efficiency program: Under this program, Charity was involved in business process re-engineering, core banking implementation and enterprise change management to drive efficiency at multiple levels. According to her, during this course, she learnt a lot about stakeholder and vendor management, which proved resourceful when she was creating a support system of other women leaders to help her in managing pressure points and focus on delivery.

Digital Transformation Program: From architecture & solutions design to UX designs, this experience was exciting and transformational for Charity. It provided her with an opportunity to cultivate an ability to transform digital channels with minimal service interruption resulting in an exponential transaction and revenue growth. The program had all the layers of transforming a business, from strategy development, execution, system implementation, business process design, service delivery and customer experience.  This event proved to be a game-changer for her career and personal growth.

Self-Belief is the Key to Being Successful

Speaking about challenges, Charity says she struggled with self-confidence during her initial career days. The imposter syndrome had got better of her as she assumed she was not as good as compared to her male co-workers in the field. This made her shy away from standing up to provide or recommend technical solutions. Fortunately, soon enough, she realized the importance of nurturing self-belief and channelized it towards self-growth and motivation. Fostering such attributes helped her have a firm resolution to mitigate any obstacle she has faced in the later course of her career and even today.

Tenets of a Dynamic Leader

Drawing inspiration from her experience, Charity emphasizes that transformational leaders should have the capability to make difficult decisions. A leader should have a clarity of thought and vision with the ability to communicate effectively. Along with that, a leader must be flexible to new norms and adaptable with changing business climate and challenges. Charity presumes that such situations also means one must be willing to take calculated risks during those demanding times. Lastly, a leader should be humble enough to keep learning, as learning is a constant process.

Disruptive Technology to Forge New Definition of Leadership

Charity is excited about opportunities brought by the potential scope of artificial intelligence and machine learning. She is especially thrilled about these technologies that help humans determine access to finance, service delivery and fraud management for the mass market in driving financial inclusion. Hence, with all the disruptive changes taking place, Charity envisions futuristic leaders possessing leapfrogging mindsets and being a lot more open-minded. Simultaneously with existing leaders embracing technology, they shall appreciate its role as a business driver and not just an enabler.

Aiming to Deliver Continued Enhanced Services

The team at Digital Paygo adheres to human-centered design thinking approach. Charity considers that innovation should solve a real human problem whilst addressing business needs.

Therefore, she is optimistic that the future ahead is exciting. Digital Paygo is at the heart of that excitement in Zambia. Charity adds that the team at her company anticipates a tomorrow where Digital Paygo is still providing a leading shared digital platform. This platform will continue helping digital financial service providers provide cost-effective services, adopt suitable business models, channel out customer-centric & relevant products and achieve maximum digital payment ecosystem growth.