MALSWITCH rebrands

"MALSWITCH has revitalized its culture, image, and product and service offerings," announced Gladson Kuyeri, the company's head of business development, marketing and sales, during a third rebranding launch in Mzuzu, Malawi on Wednesday, 15 February 2012.

A new energised culture

At the ceremony, titled 'the Purple Brand Unveiling', the company says it has realised that it never made itself visible enough and now it is time to vigorously market itself.

"The new brand will bring with it a new energised culture to the business that will resonate with our customers," said MALSWITCH CEO, Gideon Kalumbu-Phiri at the ceremony.

He said they have now decided to change the way they do business and this will be done on the foundation of MALSWITCH of the old which was equally a strong brand.

"But with the rebranding it will be stronger and more powerful now," declared Kalumbu-Phiri.

In order to rebrand, Kuyeri said they engaged Notion Communications which conducted a comprehensive and systematic audit of the current brand to discover how MALSWITCH is perceived.

A new corporate philosophy

Gladson Kuyeri

"The findings of the audit led the company to develop new business and brand strategy support our delivery to our markets," said Kuyeri.

He said this has led to realignment of the product and service portfolio to a new corporate philosophy in our vision, mission and core values. With the old brand in place, MALSWITCH's vision was to be the premier provider of infrastructure for payment systems in Malawi and was to achieve this through its mission, which was to provide an effective, secure and reliable interoperable electronic payments systems infrastructure and facilitate settlement mechanisms.

With the rebranding, the vision is to provide innovative solutions that simplify life which will be achieved through a mission of providing innovative solutions that simplify life.

ICE IT...

The rebranding has brought with it a pay-off line which is 'Simplifying life' with core values shortened to 'ICE IT' which is Innovation, Customer delight, Excellence, Integrity, Team work.

"We are intuitive, curious, inventive and bold to create new ideas for our customers, business and employees," he said.

The company, which has close to 50 brand associations that included: commercial banks, a central bank, telecommunication companies, chain stores, tobacco firms to mention but a few, has also said the rebranding has brought with it a new business cultural approach.

MALSWITCH CEO, Gideon Kalumbu-Phiri

Kuyeri said amongst the new cultural beliefs that have come about due to rebranding is to create a new generation company that understands the needs of consumers and applies innovative solutions to address these requirements.

"A company that drives quality, efficiency and value for money and brings a new corporate identity that represents the key aspirations of the company and focuses on achieving Long-term sustainability, Expansion, Acquisition and Profitability (LEAP)," explained Kuyeri.

Corporate philosophy

He said the corporate philosophy will drive the culture of the brand, and be woven into all communication touch points.

The company's backbone is the wireless 45Meg byte Duplex Backbone launched in 2006 to provide secure and reliable connectivity among the commercial banks and thus facilitate Real Time Gross Settlement and the Electronic Cheque Clearing System.

It also has the MALSWITCH Point of Sale Terminals in Puma Malawi service stations which have helped increase smart card access points for card holders.

MALSWITCH also taunts its self for establish the Puma Energy Fuel Wallet which operates as a Fleet Management System which it says has effectively drawn down the curtains to the era of fraud-prone paper fuel vouchers.

"The cash back and e-voucher distribution system that allows smartcard holders to withdraw cash from retail outlets and purchase airtime from major service providers such as Airtel, TNM and MTL is also one of our mainstay operations," he said.