Microfinance Technology Headlines for June 29, 2009by Jim Rosenberg: Monday, June 29, 2009The Hype Cycle and Mobile Banking, 2009by Jim Rosenberg: Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Today’s the second and final day of this year’s Mobile Money Summit, and the key words here are data and partnerships: Data - around the market opportunity for mobile money - by the year 2012 CGAP and GSMA estimate there will be 1.7 billion people with a mobile phone but not a bank account and as many as 364 million unbanked people could be reached by agent-networked banking through mobile phones; Partnerships - a slew of deals announced yesterday illustrate the momentum around mobile banking services, notably: Visa Launches First Commercial Mobile Payment Service in Latin America. Read the rest of this page » Microfinance Technology Headlines for June 22, 2009by Jim Rosenberg: Monday, June 22, 2009Mobile operator-centric payment schemes: Osaifu-Keitai in Japanby Sarah Rotman: Wednesday, June 17, 2009In a recent CGAP Focus Note, Ignacio Mas and I wrote about six cases of e-money schemes in developing countries. Going Cashless at the Point of Sale: Hits and Misses in Developed Countries intended to draw lessons from these experiences to inform the work being done with e-money in developing countries. The last post in this series looked at the mobile operator-centric payment scheme Simpay. Now we turn to the second such scheme, Osaifu-Keitai in Japan. DCM is Japan’s leading mobile communications operator, with 53 million subscribers as of March 2008, representing over half of Japan’s cellular market. It launched a mobile wallet service, Osaifu-Keitai (meaning: wallet-mobile phone) in July 2004. Osaifu-Keitai is based on a FeliCa card embedded in mobile phones (the same that was used by Octopus in Hong Kong). Osaifu-Keitai is a device-based mobile payments solution, supporting both proximity payments in shops that have a FeliCa chip reader and remote (online) payments. Read the rest of this page » What is the role of mobile operators in expanding access to finance?by Jim Rosenberg: Tuesday, June 16, 2009Mobile phones may have a huge role to play in expanding access to finance. But does the company that operates the mobile network need to actually provide financial services? Or should others offer financial services, with the mobile operator merely providing the underlying wireless connectivity? The fact that mobile phones can be used as transactional devices doesn’t necessarily mean that the mobile operator needs to “own” the financial service. That’s the subject of a new CGAP brief authored by Ignacio Mas and me. Read it here. Microfinance Technology Headlines for June 15, 2009by Jim Rosenberg: Monday, June 15, 2009Mobile money by the numbers…part 2by Mark Pickens: Wednesday, June 10, 2009We’re just two weeks from the Mobile Money Summit…where all will be revealed - the results of the CGAP-GSMA Mobile Money Market Sizing Study. The findings describe in detail how unbanked people use mobile money services, and also provide a framework based on industry best practices to help mobile operators drive initial adoption and progress towards more sophisticated offerings, such as savings and credit. Read the rest of this page » Findings from the field: An observation on M-PESA impactby Olga Morawczynski: Tuesday, June 9, 2009![]() photo courtesy of Olga Morawczynski Last month, I described an observation on usage that came from my ethnographic fieldwork. I noted that money flows reversed during the post-election violence in Kenya. That is, urban migrants were receiving money and airtime from their rural relatives. M-PESA has also generated a variety of impacts to the daily lives of its users. One of the most significant will be described in this week’s blog. That is, changing remittance patterns. Users began to make transfers “in bits”, remitting smaller amounts of money more frequently. “Before M-PESA, I used Posta [post office] and would transfer money at month-end. Now I send the money in bits. I send every week. Sometimes I send twice in a week. It is cheaper for me to send with M-PESA…so I can send more times.” Read the rest of this page » Microfinance Technology Headlines for June 8, 2009by Jim Rosenberg: Monday, June 8, 2009 |