In my last post I began to describe MTN Uganda’s MobileMoney, a service that has turned an exciting corner into cash-flow positive territory. But the CFO of any mobile network operator (MNO) knows that simply getting out of the red on a month-to-month basis is not enough; his alternative investment options are usually very attractive, so he needs to know just how much is required to scale a mobile money service – and whether future income will justify the spend.

From Afghanistan to Zambia, mobile network operators (MNOs) in developing countries are launching mobile money services at a rapid pace. Yet while their enthusiasm to enter this business is clear – to date 83 deployments have been launched and another 82 are being planned – their rationale for doing so is not. There’s no doubt that Safaricom’s runaway hit, M-PESA, is profitable. But Kenya represents somewhat of an anomaly – the perfect coalescence of latent demand, a dominant MNO and a progressive regulator. So the question remains for just about every MNO outside of Kenya: is there really any money in mobile money?

By now, most mobile money practitioners recognize that for a service to succeed, the agents that support it need to be making money. In recent months, we’ve written about how mobile network operators have carefully managed their customer/agent ratios over time to ensure agents are provided with a sufficient volume of transactions to stay interested – but volume is only half of the equation. To keep agents happy, mobile network operators must also ensure the commission models they present to agents are well designed

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

Today 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.

Today 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?

If 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…

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…

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…