By:
Marina Solin: June 30th, 2009
The first annual Mobile Money Leadership Forum was held in Barcelona on 25 June, 2009. To our knowledge this was the first event of this size designed to promote dialogue between financial regulators and the mobile industry. The event was attended by over 70 participants from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
In my opening remarks, I emphasized that “we don’t have to agree, but we can all listen to one another”. What followed was a great deal of productive dialogue. The group took advantage of this unique opportunity to pursue their curiosity about the topic of mobile money and engage in some frank and open discussions. There were are a few key themes and statements that I would like to highlight from the discussion.
By:
Paul Leishman: June 24th, 2009
The GSMA Mobile Money Summit concluded moments ago in Barcelona. The 2-day event was filled with presentations designed to help attendees understand and execute on the mobile money opportunity. In the closing session, several people noted the contrast in focus between last year’s event in Cairo, which was characterized by a focus on understanding the potential of the market opportunity, and this year’s event which focused on how to execute. I jotted down a few figures on my BlackBerry which I found to be particularly interesting – I’ve listed them below.
By:
Paul Leishman: June 19th, 2009
This is the final post in our series on customer adoption leading up to the Mobile Money Summit in Barcelona. The previous posts mapped to the first two steps in the adoption framework that will be released in the Mobile Money for the Unbanked Annual Report: driving awareness and driving demand. The final post relates to the third step – optimizing trial. Specifically, this post addresses the importance of designing an efficient and effective registration process.
By:
Paul Leishman: June 18th, 2009
This is the second post in our series on customer adoption leading up to the Mobile Money Summit in Barcelona. The previous post introduced the importance of driving service awareness and understanding as enablers of adoption. This post addresses the importance of ‘driving demand’, which is the second step in the adoption framework that will be presented at the MMU working group and in the Mobile Money for the Unbanked Annual Report. Specifically, we will focus on one key element – the importance of positioning mobile money so that the unbanked perceive it to be a ‘service for people like me’.
By:
Paul Leishman: June 17th, 2009
Leading up to the Mobile Money Summit in Barcelona next week, I will be writing a series of posts on ‘adoption drivers’ that have emerged from the CGAP-GSMA Mobile Money Market Sizing Study. These drivers are part of an adoption framework that will be expanded on during my presentation at the MMU working group, and in the 2009 Mobile Money for the Unbanked Annual Report. The first post in this series examines two metrics that can be considered as basic enablers of mobile money adoption – service awareness and understanding.
By:
Paul Leishman: June 8th, 2009
The video interview below was conducted with John, a Nairobi taxi driver and regular user of M-PESA. Seema Desai and I quizzed him about why he uses M-PESA, what he would improve, and whether he has ever had difficulties sending or withdrawing money via an agent. We recognize that John is just one customer, so to provide some context we have overlaid his comments with key findings from a survey conducted by FSD Kenya of 3,000 M-PESA customers.
