Today 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 mobile money system, and then converting it back out again); in many instances, agents register new customers too. Agents usually earn commissions for performing these services.They also often provide front-line customer service—such as teaching new users how to initiate transactions on their phone. Typically, agents will conduct other kinds of business in addition to mobile money. The kinds of individuals or businesses that can serve as agents will sometimes be limited by regulation, but small-scale traders, microfinance institutions, chain stores, and bank branches serve as agents in some markets. Some industry participants prefer the terms merchant or retailer to describe this person or business to avoid certain legal connotations of the term agent as it is used in other industries.'>agent distribution, and conversations ranged from individual agent economics to the best practice for structuring an agent network, to the role that scratch cards might play. After some introductory remarks by Seema Desai, the day got started with a presentation on agent economics in Brazil by CGAP’s Mark Pickens. You can find his summary and presentation here, but I found a couple things particularly interesting:

- Agents handle 2.4 billion transactions per year
- Agents in Brazil make just $5.17 in profit per day, or 4 cents per transaction
- Agents do 166 transactions per day, or 1 transaction every 3 minutes

After Mark, I provided some learnings provided to me by Cambodia’s WING. Their model is particularly interesting and they’ve got some hard earned experience tackling key issues that many operators will face early on in their launches. Much of the conversation oriented around WING’s decision to use ‘Pilots’ for registration, and WING Cash Express Agents for cash in/out. Some operators, like MTN Uganda, have used a similar approach (although WING calls their staff ‘field registration agents’ rather than ‘Pilots’, so the learnings were timely. To help put WING’s model in context, we used M-PESA’s agent network as somewhat of a foil. Comparing the agent networks, it was interesting to see that there are two main differences: first, whereas M-PESA has one uniform agent that provides registration,c ash in and cash out, WING has two categories of agents – one category that does registration, and another that does cash in/out. Second, whereas M-PESA’s network of today has multiple tiers, WING’s had just one at launch – a second one was added about a year later and this looks like the tiering path that many models are following (including M-PESA).

Another highilght of the day was a discussion panel that included representation from Zain, Grameenphone, Roshan and Globe. The focus of the panel was on agent networks, and one learning that I found particularly interesting was the approach operators on this panel have taken to structuring agent incentives. Globe, Grameenphone and Zain all provide their agents with some degree of input into the ultimate price of the service, and thus, the agent’s commimssion. This approach varies notably from Safaricom’s fixed tariff structure, which is often touted as contributing to the consistent customer experience that fuelled the growth of the service.

I’ll share more in the coming days but thought I would share my highlights from a day where many people contributed to the learnings shared. Keep a watch out for the presentations from the day.

Case Study Presentation at MWC