By:
Paul Leishman: March 24th, 2010
When you put mobile money enthusiasts in a room and ask them to talk about distribution, it’s only a matter of time before someone brings up Coca Cola. In the ensuing conversation, Coke is usually praised for their distribution prowess and held up as a model to which our industry should aspire. But this story is familiar to us all by now, so today I want to tell a different one. In this new story, we see Coca Cola leveraging Zain’s Zap to solve a major distribution challenge in Tanzania: dealing with cash.
Before addressing why cash is so painful and how Zap is helping, let’s quickly review the distribution model Coke uses to get their product onto the shelves of retailers…
By:
Neil Davidson: March 17th, 2010
It used to be that mobile money was synonymous with domestic P2P transfers – the “killer app” that propelled Safaricom’s M-PESA to such extraordinary success. It was clear that Safaricom had tapped a rich vein of latent demand for a safe and affordable way to remit money in-country, and this kicked off a rush to bring such services to market all over the world.
Yet a number of mobile money platforms that mainly offer P2P transfers have struggled to attract users over the course of the last year…
By:
Camilo Tellez: March 12th, 2010
In this second entry to our spotlight on Latin America series we will explore the southern cone. Comprised of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, this is a highly diverse group which overall exhibits the highest HDI (Human Development Index) of Latin America, and its relatively high standard of living make it the most prosperous macro-region. That is not to say that mobile money for the unbanked does not have a place in these countries. In Argentina for example, the economic collapse in 2001 left more than half of the population living in poverty and completely eroded the trust in the banking sector.
By:
Paul Leishman: March 8th, 2010
The mobile industry is a bit obsessed with metrics. We’ve got one for every phase of the customer lifecycle, from cost of acquisition (COA) to average revenue per user (ARPU) to cost of retention (COR) to name just a few. It seems, though, that from our endless selection of acronyms, we still spend almost all of our time talking about two in particular when it comes to mobile money: ARPU and churn. Not to say that’s a bad thing – it’s important that emerging industries have a clear view of the opportunity that rationalizes their investment and effort. But given that so much is being said about these two metrics, today I want to talk about the other important metric that operators need to think about: the active user rate…
By:
Camilo Tellez: March 3rd, 2010
It’s only been two months since the GSMA Mobile Money Deployment Tracker was launched and we are already seeing a noticeable increase in the number of live and planned deployments worldwide. This interactive tool was designed to track the number of mobile money deployments targeting the unbanked segment, as well as present in depth data, remittance corridors, and socio-economic information on the countries in which these deployments are being launched.
So what’s been happening in the last couple months?
By:
Paul Leishman: March 2nd, 2010
With the Mobile Money Summit fast approaching, I’ve spent a few minutes addressing some of the questions that were posed to the GSMA team most frequently in Barcelona. If you have other questions beyond the ones below, feel free to post a comment.
By:
Camilo Tellez: March 1st, 2010
In May 2010, the Mobile Money Summit will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While the event has a global remit, it will provide a unique opportunity to highlight the coming of age of Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) in Latin America. In anticipation of the event, I will be writing a series of posts focusing on the region, showcasing along the way the current opportunities and challenges in the deployment and implementation of mobile money. This will be a 3-part series, with each post to follow focusing on developments in the following Latin American regions:
- Southern Cone and Brazil
- The Andean region
- Mexico and Central America.
