Before launching a mobile money service, it behoves operators to think carefully about how to prevent abuse that would harm customers. Such foresight helps assure regulators that the service will be safe and in turn safeguards the operator from reputational risk that would arise from its failure or widespread fraudulent use.
But customers and agents aren’t [...]
Archive
Author Archive
Protecting Customers and Operators from the Abuse of Mobile Money Services
By: Paul Leishman: May 11th, 2010GSMA Publish Case Study on Zain’s Zap
By: Paul Leishman: May 4th, 2010Today GSMA is publishing a case study on ‘Zap’, Zain’s mobile money service that was introduced in February 2009. In just over a year, Zap has been deployed in Bahrain, Kenya, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Niger, Malawi and Uganda. But while Zain’s desire to make Zap ubiquitous is clear, so far their approach to designing mobile money ecosystems has been less well documented – and perhaps a bit misunderstood.
Part 2 of GSMA Handbook on Agent Networks: How to Incentivise a Network of Mobile Money Agents
By: Paul Leishman: April 21st, 2010Today we are publishing the second section of the GSMA handbook on agent networks, entitled “How to Incentivise a Network of Mobile Money Agents”. In this section, we seek to answer a broad question: how can mobile network operators design a set of incentives that encourage agents to become active and productive participants in mobile money distribution?
Pakistan’s Shared Platform: An Interview with MCB and Fundamo
By: Paul Leishman: April 1st, 2010If you weren’t at Mobile World Congress, you would have missed a very interesting co-presentation from Qasif Shahid, EVP at MCB Bank and Aletha Ling, Executive Director at Fundamo. Qasif and Aletha provided an overview of MCB Mobile, which launched in June 2009 in Pakistan and have since gained some impressive traction, registering over 70,000 customers to date.
Something particularly interesting about the deployment is their decision to launch using a shared platform. To understand more about their approach, I recently had a conversation with Qasif Shahid and Mazahir Ali Sayeed from MCB, and Hannes van Rensburg from Fundamo…
How Zain’s Zap is Improving Coke’s Distribution Model
By: Paul Leishman: March 24th, 2010When 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…
Spotlight on the Active User Rate: What Deployments are Seeing and How They’re Responding
By: Paul Leishman: March 8th, 2010The 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…
Q&A: 2010 Mobile Money Summit (May 24-27) in Rio de Janeiro
By: Paul Leishman: March 2nd, 2010With 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.
GSMA Hosts Central African Mobile Money Roundtable – Focus on Regional Regulation
By: Paul Leishman: February 25th, 2010On Tuesday in Yaounde, we hosted the GSMA Central African Mobile Money Roundtable. This was the first regional event of its kind hosted by the GSMA, and it was designed to share information and experiences regulating mobile money with BEAC, the financial services regulator for the Economic Community of Central African States, which includes Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon.
The roundtable was attended by MTN, Orange, Zain, Camtel, Citibank, Afriland First Bank, BEAC, BCEAO, Central Bank of Kenya (thanks to the support of the Alliance of Financial Inclusion), Bank of Ghana, CGAP and GSMA.
So why did we choose to host our first regional regulatory roundtable in Cameroon?
2010 Mobile World Congress: Day 2 of Mobile Money in Review
By: Paul Leishman: February 16th, 2010Today was day number two of Mobile World Congress, and for me (and most readers of our blog), the highlight had to be the MMU Working Group. Mobile operators, vendors and other industry stakeholders convened to exchange learnings in our full-day interactive session.
The focus of the day was agent distribution, and conversations ranged from individual [...]
2010 Mobile World Congress: Day 1 of Mobile Money in Review
By: Paul Leishman: February 15th, 2010The first day of the 2010 Mobile World Congress has officially come to a close. Today was an eventful day for anyone interested in mobile money: this year, we introduced ‘Mobile Money Monday’, an action packed day filled with presentations and panels from the likes of SMART, Telenor, Turkcell, Orange, Telefonica, Vodafone, Roshan, SingTel, Axiata, [...]
News Tracker
- 1. Obopay announces new offering "Mobile Money for Banks"
- 2. A new kind of mobile aid for Haiti
- 3. MTN Uganda approaching one million MobileMoney subscribers
- 4. Orange money launches in Mali
- 5. Malawi launches mobile banking
- 6. Visa and Monitise take on India
- 7. Etisalat launches trial of mobile remittance service
- 8. M-Pesa earns Safaricom $94 million US last year
- 9. CGAP releases pricing study across 16 providers in 10 countries
Copyright © 2009 GSM Association. GSM and the GSM Logo are registered and owned by the GSM Association | Disclaimer
