MANORANJAN MOHAPATRA CEO,Comviva Dinesh, a small trader in Pune, can now pay for electricity bills, top-up his mobile phone and send money to large wholesalers in Maharashtra, without visiting a bank. Preeti, a domestic worker in Delhi, sends money back home to her family in Bihar. Payments through mobile are now a reality in India.
Category Archives: Contributions
Interoperability – the watch word for 2012
Killian Clifford. Mobile Money Consulting. He will be speaking at the MobileMoney WestAfrica summit in Lagos on March 5th & 6th In a previous posting, I pointed to a statistic which said that MPESA accounts for more than half of the world’s mobile money users. Mobile money services in countries outside of Kenya have just
Africa’s mobile banking revolution: the poor now have access to financial services
Frank E. Afful Mobile banking and mobile money are revolutionising the face of personal and business banking in Africa. There is no need to carry a bank card orcheque book on you. You do not even have to visit the local bank branch to transfer or withdraw money. All you need now is a mobile
The impact of regulation on mobile money remittance services across the South African borders
Kim Dancey, Strategic Legal Advisor, FNB eWallet Solutions With an estimated 300 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, USA and UK development agencies have noted that of the new technologies offering improvements to remittance services and reductions in transaction costs, mobile phones hold the greatest promise for Africa. Remittances, the money sent home by migrant workers, has
PrePay solutions backing Ericsson Money in Europe
Ericsson Money Services has partnered with PrePay Solutions, the UK’s leading prepaid services company, to operate Ericsson Money in Europe under the European Union Electronic Money regulation. Mobile phone users in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Sweden can already today sign up at www.ericssonmoney.com to send and receive money to and from
Banks warned to keep up with technology or lose customers
Gregor Hunter Banks aiming to retain their customers must court the Middle East’s young, technologically adept population with innovative payment methods or suffer dwindling profits, a top banker has warned. Speaking at the Middle East Retail Banking Forum in Dubai, Sanjoy Sen, the regional head of consumer banking at Citibank, said banks should heed
SIM CARD REGISTRATION: A CHANCE TO FORMALIZE AN INFORMAL ECONOMY, DIGITALLY
Edward Kustoati A growing number of sub-Saharan African countries – South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and more recently, Ghana – now require that the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card in a mobile phone be tied to the user’s name. The main reason: to combat crime. But I am afraid that with its
Navigating the Mobile Money regulatory landmine in West Africa
Principal consultant @ mobilemoneyafrica.com Advisory board member @ Frontlinesms Credit , USA West Africa is not yet popularly known for Mobile financial services but yet some providers are making in-roads into this region of more than 300 million people and over 120 million mobile subscribers. The region is actively pursuing paper based regional common currency
Bright days ahead for mobile banking
By Zachary Ochieng The advent of the Internet has revolutionised the way the financial services industry conducts business, empowering organisations with new business models and new ways to offer 24×7 accessibility to their customers. With mobile technology, banks can offer a wide range of services to their customers such as doing funds transfer while
Benefits of mobile money transfer trickle down to rural folk
By GEOFFREY IRUNGU Before 2008, analysts lamented that Kenya was performing poorly in financial inclusion. But that was before M-Pesa became appreciated as a popular money transfer technology. Research done in 2009 noted that such inclusion had risen by about six per cent in terms of people holding bank accounts, but at the same time
