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…
Whenever a mobile money deployment announces customer numbers, the first question people typically ask is ‘yes, but how many of those customers are active’? It’s a fair question. Active user rates vary across deployments and have an enormous impact on profitability. Analysis of different markets has revealed three broad challenges that deployments face when it comes to active rates. The first two challenges involve persuading customers to perform an acceptable number of transactions. If these challenges aren’t quickly and adequately addressed, they spawn a third, equally troublesome challenge: out of practice, unsatisfied agents.
So how are deployments addressing these challenges?
The Mobile Money for the Unbanked team has been keen to find out more about what is happening in Asia outside of the Philippines, or at least what the feeling was towards mobile money across the Asian continent. I have spent the last few days at the GSMA Asia Pacific Conference, which took place in Shanghai, China. This event is run by a committee of operators who set the agenda, invite speakers and host the event. The Conference attracts over 300 attendees with strong operator representation from across the region. For the first time at this event, which has been traditionally focused on roaming and interconnectivity issues, approximately a third of the agenda was dedicated to mobile money. In this post, I describe a few highlights from the event.
