On December 14th, the MMU programme at the GSMA hosted a webinar on the topic of mobile money pricing and commisions . This interactive session was designed to help mobile money practitioners capture best practices from deployments around the world. In this first post, we are sharing the pricing component of the webinar in which Paul Leishman and Camilo Tellez discuss best practices in valuing a mobile money service, structuring a tariff sheet and proofing against fraud.

Around the world, mobile money deployments are racking up large numbers of new customers. But as certain commentators have noted, these numbers are sometimes misleading. In some deployments, a gap is opening up between the number of registered users and the number of active users. Does this make the number of registered users irrelevant? Quite the contrary—a large gap between the number of registered and unregistered customers represents a big problem. Operators have to spend money for every customer that they acquire; if those customers don’t start using the service, then the operator who signed them up has started to dig a financial hole for themselves. And those holes can be pretty deep.

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

This is the second part of the GSMA webinar on the topic of mobile money pricing and commisions . This interactive session was designed to help mobile money practitioners capture best practices from deployments around the world. In this post, we are sharing the commission component of the webinar in which Paul Leishman and Camilo Tellez discuss best practices in setting mobile money commissions including and overview of agent profitability drivers and how to influence agent profitability

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?