Today, we’re publishing a case study that compares Thailand’s True Money with the industry’s best known success story, M-PESA.
Launched in 2005, True Money is now used by 6 million customers. The system processes over USD$900 million in electronic payments and 120 million transactions per year. This doesn’t match the US$3.5 billion in P2P payments M-PESA processes per year, but it does suggest that the model has gained some traction…
The Mobile Money for the Unbanked Programme has awarded grants to AKTEL in Bangladesh, Dialog Telekom PLC in Sri Lanka, Grameenphone Ltd in Bangladesh, MTN Cameroon, MTN Uganda and Vodacom Tanzania. This is in addition to the grants that were already announced in October, to SMART, AXIS, Roshan and Oi. The funding from MMU will serve to accelerate these deployments, and the learnings will be shared by the Programme with the wider industry in order to accelerate other deployments around the world. Funding is still available for operators to apply for - if you are interested in finding out more about the Fund, please contact Seema Desai, sdesai@gsm.org.
More information on each grantee after the jump.
It’s often said that mobile money is a brand new business model. Neither traditional value-added services offered by mobile network operators nor financial services offered by bricks-and mortar-banks are very helpful as models when trying to think through the economics of mobile money or the strategic dynamics that govern the industry.
But we do have some clues about how mobile money markets will evolve. Mobile network operators and other providers that offer mobile money services are, structurally speaking, offering platforms that allow users to interact with each other, forming a network. And it turns out that such platform-mediated networks are plentiful in our world. To take an example that’s close at hand, Microsoft Word, which I’m using to type this paragraph, is a platform, created (and monetised) by Microsoft, that allows me to share documents with any other user in the world who also has Word installed. Analogously, a mobile money service like M-PESA in Kenya is a platform which allows users to transact financially with each other.
Why is this important? Well, platform-mediated networks behave in surprising ways. Sometimes they grow explosively; other times—as network operators and banks in many markets have learned—it can be tough to generate substantial customer adoption of mobile money services.
That’s in part because the growth, or stagnation, of platform-mediated networks is affected by network effects….
The mobile money community has watched (and compared) the adoption of M-PESA in Kenya and Tanzania with great interest. We’re pleased this month to offer an article from Gunnar Camner and Emil Sjoblom from Valuable Bits, and Caroline Pulver from FSD Kenya, which provides a full comparison of the factors which have impacted adoption rates in the two countries. The in-field observations and market research that their paper draws on provides an excellent summary of the contributing factors in each country - from market level to service design.
In mobile money, we spend a lot of time talking about innovative ways to deliver financial services to the unbanked poor in spite of their income, geographic and trust barriers to banking. But what about serving the banked? This post explores three ways that leading mobile money deployments use technology to serve the banked and/or those who are key sources of funds, including:
- Automating the cash-in step (video of SMART auto-reloader)
- Integrating with bank accounts
- Offering ATM access
Leading up to the Mobile Money Summit in Barcelona next week, I will be writing a series of posts on ‘adoption drivers’ that have emerged from the CGAP-GSMA Mobile Money Market Sizing Study. These drivers are part of an adoption framework that will be expanded on during my presentation at the MMU working group, and in the 2009 Mobile Money for the Unbanked Annual Report. The first post in this series examines two metrics that can be considered as basic enablers of mobile money adoption – service awareness and understanding.
The video interview below was conducted with John, a Nairobi taxi driver and regular user of M-PESA. Seema Desai and I quizzed him about why he uses M-PESA, what he would improve, and whether he has ever had difficulties sending or withdrawing money via an agent. We recognize that John is just one customer, so to provide some context we have overlaid his comments with key findings from a survey conducted by FSD Kenya of 3,000 M-PESA customers.
