In 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 extrapolate lessons from these experiences to shed light on the work being done with e-money in developing countries. In past posts, I chose excerpts of the paper that discussed smartcard-based electronic-cash provider schemes. Now I turn to mobile operator-faciliated instruments, looking first at Mobipay.

Mobipay is a mobile payment mechanism that allows customers to pay for goods through their mobile phone using a range of payment instruments: credit cards, debit cards, or the operator’s account. It supports both in-person and remote payments. The platform is open to any mobile operator or payment instrument issuer in Spain.

Each Mobipay customer gets a virtual wallet, which can contain up to nine different payment instruments. Each time the customer wants to make a payment, the system will ask which of the available payment instruments the user wishes to pay with. Customers can register a new bank payment instrument in their mobile wallet by requesting it from its issuer (through their branch, ATM, Internet banking, or telephone banking channels) or by sending a short messaging service (SMS) with the keyword ALTA (subscribe) followed by the card number. Mobile operators automatically register the mobile account as a payment method (whether the customer is on a prepay or postpay plan) when their customers use Mobipay for the first time.

There are three main ways of initiating a payment. For smaller, in-person transactions, customers can give their phone number to the merchant, who will then issue the payment request. Larger retailers can use a special barcode reader that can acquire the customer’s mobile phone number directly by reading a tag on the customer’s phone, which reduces the possibility of error. For purchases from machines or for remote purchases, the customer can enter a transaction code that identifies the product to be purchased (e.g., a parking meter might display the code *145*980*122#). In this case, the customer initiates the payment request.

Mobipay was trialed in mid-2002 in a small town and launched nationally in late 2002. In less than a year, it acquired 17,000 customers and 4,500 merchants (2,800 online and 1,700 bricks and mortar). Six years later, there are only 400,000 registered—not necessarily active—users, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population. And less than 2000 transactions are processed daily.

This dismal performance can be explained by two main factors. First, Spain is highly penetrated with banking services and infrastructure, so Mobipay struggled to open up a niche in the retail payments market. Second, Mobipay did not have a marketing budget to promote its own service; it had to rely instead on promotion by its shareholders (who were also its customers). These shareholders, in turn, did not see much benefit in promoting the Mobipay brand, because they felt that their competitors (whether the telecoms or the banks) would benefit equally from their marketing expenditures. As a result, Mobipay has languished in the absence of effective marketing or a “killer application” that can raise public awareness of the service.

You can read about the other cases we analyzed in the paper here.