Reviews the emerging literature on the definitions and model taxonomies employed in mobile banking; the status and drivers of global adoption of these schemes; the take-up and usage patterns of customers and their socio-economic impact; and, finally,

Before a mobile money service can turn a profit, it must first be operationally healthy. This may sound obvious (okay, it definitely sounds obvious), but today many mobile money practitioners are unable to report with clarity whether their service is operationally healthy along the dimensions that matter most.

So today we’re pleased to present a solution to this problem: the GSMA Mobile Money Metrics Dashboard. This Dashboard presents practitioners with an easily digestible summary of their operational metrics that matter most. This tool is more than an excel spreadsheet: for existing customers of Comviva, Fundamo, Sybase 365, or Utiba, the Dashboard can be integrated as a reporting feature free of charge.

For a mobile money service to scale and achieve profitability, it’s critical to have well designed customer tariff and agent commission models. This is a topic we’ve written about extensively already: Neil Davidson and I shared some insights on how MNOs can best incentivise agents in the “How to Incentivise a Network of Mobile Money Agents” section of our recent agent network handbook; in August I wrote a blog post detailing four common pitfalls that MNOs should avoid when designing their agent commission models; and any reader who’s used the GSMA Financial Model will know that pricing and commissions are one of the most sensitive variables at play.

When most people hear the phrase “to turn a profit, we need to manage our costs”, they usually take it to mean “to turn a profit, we need to reduce our costs”. But when it comes to mobile money, practitioners have found that some costs can be done away with more easily than others. So the trick, then, is to understand which are strategic (and must be protected), and which are discretionary (and can be curtailed).

So far on this blog, we’ve written about the role that indirect benefits play in enabling a mobile network operator (MNO) to turn a profit from a mobile money service – but what about the most obvious source of value, direct revenue from customer fees? After all, as stated in a previous post, this is often the single source of value upon which MNOs evaluate the business case for mobile money.

In my last post, I wrote about the significance of churn reduction benefits to the profitability case for mobile money; and when people talk about indirect benefits, ‘reduction in churn’ is usually closely followed in the same sentence by ‘uplift in ARPU’ (Average Revenue Per User). Having shed light on the important role churn benefits can play in the context of profitability, now we’ll focus on the role of uplift in ARPU. But before we answer the question posed in the title of this post, let’s first determine whether ‘uplift in ARPU’ is even the right metric for practitioners to measure.

If you’ve ever attended a mobile money conference, you’ve likely heard a speaker tout the potential benefit of ‘reduced churn’ that mobile money can unlock for an MNO. But what you probably haven’t heard is whether any service has actually delivered on this promise – and if so, whether the subsequent benefits amount to a big or small deal in the overall financial model.

One of the most important sources of value for mobile network operators (MNOs) who offer mobile money services is the ability to sell airtime using the platform. When a customer buys airtime using mobile money rather than with scratch cards, operators unlock value in two ways. First, they pay lower commissions: the commissions paid to agents for performing cash-in (a necessary step before buying airtime) are typically lower than the discounts at which MNOs sell airtime to the channel—although the degree of difference will vary by market.