Christina Cacioppo : Notes on M-PESA
Christina is awesome; love this insight and color on mobile banking in Kenya.
"I spent a few weeks in Kenya in September. In many ways, Kenya is immensely tech savvy, including in its payments systems. M-PESA is a mobile money system that Vodafone launched in Kenya in 2007. It’s not something often written about in the US, but it’s very relevant to payments systems broadly. Here’s a few thoughts/facts/observations:"
More than half of all mobile payments in the world happen over M-PESA?!
M-PESA is the world’s most widely-adopted mobile payments system.
More than 50% of the mobile payments in the world happen over M-PESA. M-PESA operates in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Afghanistan, and India, though almost all transactions still take place in Kenya, the first launch market. M-PESA was developed by Safaricom and Vodafone (Safaricom’s parent company). The IP is still held by Vodafone.
M-PESA’s premise is simple: users conduct instant peer-to-peer money transfers, using phone numbers as identifiers. Cash enters and leaves the system through M-PESA agents or traditional ATMs.
Bonus points for the recommendation of this Kindle Single on M-PESA.
Innovation in Kenya, leading the way for the future of the world.
BTW 1/4 of all Americans are unbanked/underbanked. Seems m-pesa would be useful.
It would be, is the challenge to that mostly regulatory or mostly cultural?
Regulatory, from what I've been learning.
It also seems like Walmart would be a prime candidate to implement such a scheme: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/wal-mart-going-head-to-head-with-banks-with-prepaid-american-express-card/2012/10/08/c3be0110-1159-11e2-a16b-2c110031514a_story.html
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