Samuel Sephiri

As CAO, I drive product development through porcess and data strategy,while incorporating AI innovation, and monetization across multiple sectors. I lead Platform as a Service (PaaS), oversee MLOps and cloud-based AI solutions, and ensure data governance and compliance. My role involves executive engagement, specialist alignment, optimizing AI-driven risk models, and transforming data into revenue-generating asset.I consult with different companies to optimise their data strategies and products.

My role in the organization is to execute machine learning/artificial intelligence use cases in the Fintech/BankTech space and develop 'Scoring as Service' capability augmented by Platform as a service as an initial phase while building up on the MTN Mobile Money roadmap and strategic initiatives which will include other disruptive and baseline models across 14 countries where MTN MoMo is present.

❖ Presented a $220m potential benefit per year, to FinTech CEO and other executives, by motivating an in-house 'scoring as a service' solution and continued to provide framework, guidance and collaboration with product and commercial developers to leverage cloud-based machine learning frameworks to execute this value.

❖ New revenue and data monetisation engagement with Executive/C-suite

❖ Deploy machine learning models into production using best practices, including Web Services/REST APIs, for internal consumption and externally for data monetization, ensuring API marketplace readiness.This streamlined model deployment using PMML, reducing deployment time and minimizing costs.

❖ Responsible for MLOps framework and maintaining end-end best practices deployment by leveraging Kubernete Orchestration and secured network environment.

❖ Impart knowledge and mentor aspiring data scientists to add better value propositions that scales.

My role in the organization is to standardise data analytics and provide guidance relating application of analytics, business intelligence, data science across 23 operating countries (Opco) on how to build solutions/use cases that drive business insights through the following;

❖ Review of strategic initiatives through data analytics for 23 operating countries and provide recommended actions.

❖ Seat across multiple steering committees that approve/decision making for business strategies

❖ Lead advanced analytics use case initiatives within Data & Analytics Centre of Excellence, as applicable and drive the required change in to analytics monetization use case(s)

❖ Deployed Big Data Analytics platform, Data Governance Frameworks and Machine Learning applications :

• Data Model design,Metadata flow, Data Lineage,Target to Source Mapping and

• Executive Dashboard - KPI definition and development to support MTN Exco

• Deployed advanced analytics use cases with Machine Learning & Deep Learning

• Advanced Analytics Mart for Customer 360

• Smartphone penetration/Device Analytics

• Tariff Optimization

• CVM (Propensity and Churn models)

• Smart Capex for Network capacity planning, to justify R30bn capex across the Telco

• Support CVM with their use cases to achieve $150m incremental revenue through ML use case monetization. ❖ Spearheaded, developed and implemented, the 1st MTN Group Data Science Academy in 2018 across our 6 African footprint to upskill over 100+ MTN employees.