01 January 2020
Stephen Newton, CEO, biNU
When was your big career break?
I was a founding team member of the Hitwise EMEA team and started as a business development manager. I was already a lawyer who decided to go a different direction and in many ways had to start back in what could be considered a junior position. I did well for a few years but then became disenchanted but knew that I didn’t want to go back to law. I shared my frustration with the GM and was ready to leave Hitwise to do an MBA to add to my Juris Doctorate degree. The GM convinced me to take a few courses at the IoD of London and then take the role of GM myself. He reasoned that I could earn my “MBA” in practice by running a business. He took a chance on me which paid off as I grew the EMEA division to the most profitable division in the business and the engine that created value for the sale of the business to Experian for over $300m.
What is the best thing about your job?
It’s very satisfying that we are solving an actual problem faced by hundreds of millions of people every single day: high data costs. The best way to think about biNu is to compare it to toll-free calls: most people are familiar with this concept where a company or brand is willing to pay for the cost of a telephone call from their clients or prospective clients. We do the same thing for websites and for applications. We partner with mobile network operators to Zero Rate (Reverse Bill is another term) a website or app. We then offer this service to companies enabling them to reach their clients and prospective clients on any mobile network. The company or brand pays for the mobile customer’s use of data on the company’s website or application, often supporting this from their already existing marketing, communications and/or client acquisition budgets. The mobile consumer, is then free to engage with the company’s/brand’s website or application without fear of using or abusing their data allowance.
What is the hardest thing about your job?
Getting the content/ media/ advertising market to see that there is an obvious need for a paradigm shift in the industry.
What has been your career low to date?
Playing axe man for a large corporate making hundreds of people redundant in a year.
Who has been your biggest inspiration?
Professionally Larry Page, Sergey Brin, & Jay- Z
What has been your career high to date?
Taking part in two successful exits in less than a decade.
What is your biggest regret to date?
I wish I’d had more equity in DoubleClick before the Google sale!
What would you say is the best technological advancement in your lifetime?
Undoubtedly the affordable smart phone. This has enabled the lives of millions to be changed.
What is the best business lesson you have learned?
Sometimes you need to soften your gaze and find the similarities, businesses are not all that different.
If you had to work in a different industry, what would it be?
Maybe content creation.
What is the biggest challenge the industry faces at the moment?
Media consumption in Africa is still dominated by TV/Radio. However, this is a forced reality. Across Africa, there are more phones, than TVs and Radios, but in most countries whether you pay a TV license or not, you have uninterrupted access to Free to Air TV and radio. You don’t have the same privilege on the most ubiquitous device, if you don’t have data, your portal to content becomes useless. Change this dynamic, make data a non issue, and the mobile phone becomes the largest media outlet automatically.
What, in your opinion, holds a lot of African nations back?
The inability or unwillingness to stand unified.
Which competitor you admire the most and why?
We all have a part to play in the industry solving different problems: affordable devices, affordable “always on” access to data, relevant content (text, products/services), ubiquitous payment mechanisms, trusted delivery mechanisms and all of the technologies that weave this all together. I don’t see rivals, I see players in the eco-system. So there are many I admire, WhatsApp, Facebook, WeChat. M-Pesa to name a few.
What is the best thing about working in this industry?
I often say that, in our business, we are not performing heart surgery, no one is dying. However, mobile technology has helped improved the lives of millions by connecting them to the world, to life saving information, to jobs, to commerce. So although no one is dying, it is helping millions to live better lives.
What do you want to do when you retire?
Retire?
biNU helps organisations to build and maintain #datafree websites and apps which are the data equivalent of 0800 calls. #datafree biNu is also being used by commercial publishers looking to extend their audience reach and engagement with mobile consumers. In August it announced a partnership between biNu and MTN to enable all websites and apps to be #datafree for South Africans.
