Safaricom has announced that its chief technology officer (CTO) Thibaud Rerolle will be leaving the firm at the end of July and will be headed to Vodafone Turkey in a similar position.
Thibaud joined the telco in December 2011 from France Telecom with 17 years experience in technical matters gained from France Telecom in Europe, South America, Africa and the Caribbean.
He is credited for leading the team that was responsible for the relocation of the Mpesa servers from Germany in April 2015. He also oversaw the upgrade of the telco’s billing platform and led the business in deploying 4G. Other key Safaricom projects overseen by Mr Rerolle include a planned end-to-end 400G backbone network in partnership with Huawei and a move to roll out a digital register for M-Pesa agents which will eliminate the use of paper registers.
The 400G network is expected to increase the telco’s efficiency and reliability of services while the digital register is meant to tighten security for M-Pesa users.
Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore hailed Thibaud for leading the firm’s important milestones which includes the launch of Fuliza the overdraft service. He continued to say, “Among his biggest achievements include [sic] leading the cross-functional team responsible for the relocation of our servers from Germany, bringing M-Pesa home in April 2015. The relocation gave us better control of the platform and freedom to innovate around our customers’ needs, translating into the launch of revolutionary products such as M-Pesa Global and Fuliza.”