MMU Working Group at MMS Singapore 2011
Posted: June 29th, 2011 | viewed: (1,921) | Comments: ( 0 ) | Topic: Blog Post | Region: Global
Yesterday, the city of Singapore was the host of the 7th mobile money for the unbanked Working Group at the GSMA’s Mobile Money Summit. Over 100 participants from various organizations including MNOs, Banks, and donor agencies discussed the latest happenings in the field of MMU. These are some of the highlights from the session.
Seema Desai, Director of the MMU programme opened the working group by stressing the importance of learning from existing best practices – embedding them well, and innovating where necessary, in addition to ensuring appropriate levels of investment due to the fact that mobile money requires high upfront capital investment to succeed. She also encouraged stakeholders to work with regulators to create an environment in which mobile money services can reach low income customers in a sustainable way
Paul Leishman from MMU and Jennifer Barrasa, CEO of Top Image, a below-the-line field marketing agency that works with M-PESA discussed the importance of ensuring a quality customer experience at the agent level. Jennifer explained the role that Top Image has played in developing and maintaining Safaricom’s successful M-PESA agent network, including functions such as the training M-PESA agents, monitoring float, and supervising activations. She highlighted the importance of educating agents on the mobile money product before and after product launch, explaining how to succeed at on-going agent monitoring, liquidity, and brand management.
David Porteus, Managing Director of Bankable Frontiers presented the findings from a recent demand side study of domestic payments in the Philippines that was designed to understand: the extent to which customers in the Philippines use mobile money, for what purposes, and why – in the context of other financial services available to them. The Philippines is known around the world as the market in which the first mobile money services, SMART Money and GCASH were launched and the presentation highlighted the fact that while demand for national domestic payments in the Philippines is significant, there is little unmet need. JoJo Malolos from SMART Money joined the panel and discussed the challenges for mobile money in environments where there are existing alternatives for payments stressing the fact that the walk towards adoption can be long and arduous.
Yasmina McCarty from the MMU team discussed how driving customer activation has become one of the prominent challenges facing mobile money programmes. It is a well-known fact that marketing mobile money has proven very different from marketing airtime or any other value added service. She discussed the key challenges that MTN Uganda has faced when it comes to activating customers for mobile money, highlighting a clear gap in knowledge levels on how Mobile Money works which has kept customers from registering. In addition to registration / activation pain points such as the need to improve time lag between these two steps, especially for rural consumers
Finally, Salah Goss, Associate Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, discussed the role of the Haiti Mobile Money Initiative (HMMI) Competition, a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID in incentivizing the deployment of mobile money services in Haiti.
In the coming weeks, we will be posting the presentations and some videos related to the event. Stay tuned.
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