MTN South Africa has appointed Benjamin Marais as its new chief information officer, effective 1 March 2016. Marais, who joins MTN from Discovery Health, where he served in a similar role, replaces Neil Tomkinson, who is moving into a role at group level.
Marais, who has a BEng in electronics engineering from the University of Pretoria, has local and global experience in banking, health and digital services, MTN said in a statement.
“I am confident that with the team that I have in place and the support of the board, we can use the transformative power of technology to considerably improve the way our customers interact with the MTN brand,” Marais said in the statement.
MTN South Africa CEO Mteto Nyati said it’s crucial that the company taps into skills that can be found outside the telecommunications sector.
“There are organisations that have successfully gone through the same transformation, hence it is important to get best practice by tapping into those skills in order to set ourselves apart,” Nyati said.
“Communication has grown to become increasingly complex and therefore it is critical that the systems we have in place meet the challenges of the modern-day era,” he said. “It is pivotal that we take a proactive approach to integrating our systems, while ensuring that our processes are simplified and not burdensome for the end user.”
Meanwhile, MTN South Africa is yet to fill the position of chief technology officer following the departure in September last year of Eben Albertyn, who left to take up the role of chief technology officer at Vodafone in the Netherlands. Sidney Arnold has been acting in the position since Albertyn left. — (c) 2016 NewsCentral Media
