November 17, 2013 became a historic date in the young mobile financial industry and we feel we were very much part of writing this history. This was the day when our Converged Wallet went live for MTN Rwanda that has been operating on another vendor's platform for quite a while.

After careful preparations, the weekend began with intensive cooperation between MTN, the Ericsson m-commerce team, and the previous vendor. All steps have been tested and there we were always confident we would make it happen, but there is always a difference between performing the steps on the test-bed or doing it in the real production system.

This endeavor became a big change management project because there were changes for MTN's most valuable mobile money agents as well as for its operational staff. It was also a new experience for us who had swapped out numerous charging and billing systems around the world before but never a mobile money system. The difference is if you have a slight discrepancy on a charging system you can just give the consumer a call for free or a similar compensation, this might solve your problem, the operator has reasonably little lost revenue and the consumer is immediately happy. But with a mobile money system every single detail needs to be correct - you would never allow a mistake on your bank statement because that would erase all trust.

So, on the night from Friday to Saturday the mobile money system in Rwanda was taken out of service as planned and the old vendor produced an extract of all transactions, balances and accounts. We then uploaded all this data into our system. Saturday and Sunday were used to review and confirm that all data are complete. At first we realized some information was missing, but we were able to retrieve it quickly so the financial team had to do their job. While the technical teams were waiting for the go-ahead from the financial team, some further tests were done and the team in accordance with the set schedule tried out the first transactions.

On Sunday evening, there was the frustrating situation that we thought we had somewhere a single mismatch of less than 1USD! But, as we are operating a financial system, we couldn't accept any mismatches whatsoever. Soon thereafter it was finally cleared and the financial team signed-off the go-ahead as we rushed towards live operation, which started as planned 48 hours afterwards.

Happy about the successful hard work over the weekend we were in the mood to celebrate but all the changes that impacted the agents were not fully adopted. So MTN did a great job of reinforcing their information to them and to administer all changes very fast. An example of true teamwork, we of course supported them as far as we could. It was a lot of work but also extremely satisfactory because our team got the opportunity to visit MTN's service centers and help out frustrated agents. With the help of our team in most cases those agents left then quite impressed and happy with the improvements that they will get with our system.

Now, as I write this about 3 weeks later with the evidence that the service is performing as planned, we can start to reflect what we have done in this great team effort. We have actually completed the first ever migration of a major and successful mobile money system with more than 900,000 live subscribers. On the first attempt! Of course, this is something to be happy about, but it is also just the beginning of our journey. This was an excellent experience that we will re-use to improve our offerings and services for the benefit of our customers.

Read more about our Converged Wallet solution

About Herwig Stockl: Herwig is M-commerce's Head of Design & Deployment at Ericsson. He is a passionate leader with 20 years of international experience. He has worked for two different global high-tech companies and now forms part of the Ericsson M-commerce team. Herwig is originally from Austria and has now settled in Sweden. He lives with his wife, four children and two dogs. He believes that mobile wallets will never be more complicated to use than Twitter.