Due to its timing at the end of the conference, the day-long Leadership Forum was a good venue for distilling some of the big-picture regulatory questions that emerged during the preceding sessions. Fairly quickly, Leadership Forum panelists and participants converged on three broad areas of consensus. First, high-quality, accountable agents are necessary for successful mobile money deployments. Second, proportionality in applying customer risk management rules is essential. Third, engagement with financial regulators is a critical success factor for mobile money deployments. The challenge in the Leadership Forum was to discuss just what these broad points meant at a more granular level.
Archive
Author Archive
M-KESHO in Kenya
By: Guest Blogger: May 27th, 2010Finally, M-PESA is connecting with banks in Kenya. And with a big bang too, as two big players in the financial inclusion scene in Kenya are joining forces: Safaricom (the mobile operator behind M-PESA) and Equity Bank are launching M-KESHO, a co-branded suite of financial products that will ride on the M-PESA transactional ‘rails.’ Three years ago, there were 2.5 million bank accounts in Kenya, out of a population of 39 million.
Banking with Decency – Subtle yet Significant Benefits of Branchless Banking for Women
By: Guest Blogger: April 30th, 2010A low-income woman walks into a bank branch in Bangalore, India, with the intention of opening a bank account. Mubeena Taj does not speak or read English, but the bank account opening forms are bilingual, so she can manage with her limited Hindi reading. She is a very low-income customer and not one who helps the bank’s profit margins, but the Reserve Bank of India has mandated that all banks make available a No Frills Savings Account which requires zero minimum balance and can be opened with reduced KYC requirements.
Mobile Money for Women – Business case and strategies for using mobile money to close the gender gap for mobile services
By: Guest Blogger: April 22nd, 2010During the summer of 2009 , an extensive research initiative led by mChek was conducted amongst low-income urban and rural residents in Southern India. Its goal was to understand the processes of managing day-to-day costs in a cash-only environment, and investigate the degree to which branchless banking and mobile money could reduce transaction costs and improve livelihoods.
The Consumer Protections Built Into Branchless Banking
By: Guest Blogger: February 24th, 2010As regulators confront the challenges of regulating branchless banking, protecting the consumer is often their primary concern. And for good reason. Branchless banking is a new service targeting the least sophisticated customers and introducing new actors such as mobile network operators and retail agents into a sector formerly reserved for well capitalized and regulated commercial banks. As a result, there can be an understandable tendency to err on the side of caution.
But compliance with regulations comes at a cost – and that cost is ultimately passed on to the consumer…
Why and How to Engage Microfinance Institutions for your Mobile Money Deployment
By: Guest Blogger: January 28th, 2010This is a guest post, from Amitabh Saxena. Amitabh started the Alternative Channels workstream at ACCION in 2006 after spending several years in developing credit card products for Capital One’s Innovation Center. He has worked in strategy and implementation of various channels, particularly prepaid cards and mobile, for ACCION’s partner microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Last week in this space was an insightful blog post on the intersection of Mobile Money and Microfinance. I spent a number of years at a leading microfinance network called ACCION International, managing a new workstream I started called Alternative Channels, and last month wrote a comprehensive paper on how microfinance institutions (MFIs) can be a more active stakeholder in the m-banking space. So why and how can mobile operators approach these entities?
Unbankable Identities? ID as a Challenge at the Base of the Pyramid
By: Guest Blogger: October 23rd, 2009ID systems in developing countries attract a lot of attention from the financial inclusion sector. And for good reason – in many cases they can be a key factor contributing to the uptake of mobile money. In recent months, there have been some big announcements in this space, notably India stating their intention to roll out a national ID system that would see each of their 1 billion + citizens provided with a biometric ID. And just this week Bruno Akpaka from MTN Ghana identified the low incidence of Ghanians carrying ID cards with them in public as a key barrier to the uptake of mobile money.
With this in mind, Dr. Nicola Jentzsch, Senior Research Fellow at the Technische Universität Berlin and the DIW Berlin, provides a snapshot of the existence and type of national ID systems around the world.
How will ID systems shape the adoption and usage patterns of mobile money? Dr. Jentzsch has clarified the global landscape – read the post and join the conversation.
News Tracker
- 1. Vodacom South Africa launches M-Pesa
- 2. Easypaisa introduces donation service
- 3. Yu Cash offer international remittances from US and UK
- 4. Easypaisa introduces international money transfer service
- 5. Maroc Telecom Launches HomeSend
- 6. Bank of Philippine Islands and Globe Telecom launch cashierless payment service
- 7. Mobile Phone banking and insurance transforming the world
- 8. Mobile money’s innovation crisis
- 9. Safaricom's M-Pesa Users Rise to 61% in July From Year Ago
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