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> Posted by V. McIntyre, Freelance Writer for the Harvard Kennedy School
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”
Enthusiasm for mobile money among the financial inclusion community is generally high, but like with most topics, when you pierce beyond the surface-level praises, the tone of the conversation becomes more mixed. As Harvard Business School professor Shawn Cole stated on day three of the HKS Executive Education course Rethinking Financial Inclusion, “Mobile money has been next year’s big thing for the last ten years.”
Comments on disappointing levels of mobile money services uptake are common, and are often paired with another dominant piece in the mobile money narrative: M-Pesa’s runaway success in Kenya. Since its introduction in 2007, M-Pesa has been taken up by 70 percent of the country’s population. And as the professors pointed out, of those who used M-Pesa in the last 12 months, 43 percent did not have formal bank accounts. This statistic exhibits how mobile money provides financial services to many who might not otherwise have them. The statistic also alludes to the question of whether the service is a good on-ramp to more financial services. Questions about on-ramps and services uptake are essential to the mobile money and financial inclusion conversations at the heart of discussions throughout the weeklong HKS program. Balancing such questions were conversations that illustrated clear, and perhaps surprising, benefits of mobile money.
Jenny Aker, a professor at Tufts University, cited a study that took place during a drought in Niger which showed that distributing government aid via mobile money versus cash not only cut costs, it increased diet diversity. In this case, when women received their government benefits through their phones, they had greater control over the use of the money, and this affected household decision-making. The study also demonstrated that with mobile money the distribution and receiving of funds was cheaper for government and the recipients.
In addition, mobile money helps users weather economic shocks. Tavneet Suri, MIT professor and scientific director of J-PAL Africa, presented the results of a study of several thousand Kenyans she conducted with William Jack of Georgetown University. It showed that M-Pesa users are better able to share risk through an increase in remittances received and a higher diversity of senders. A shock that reduces consumption of a non-user by 21 percent reduces consumption by M-Pesa users by only 11 percent. Mobile money dramatically increases the size and breadth of the user’s safety net: Suri estimates the insurance value of M-Pesa at around 3-4 percent of the user’s income.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
M-Pesa, the mobile money service success story that began in Kenya in 2007 is continuing its march, this time into the surprising location of Romania, raising the questions, what will the product look like in this new European market and how will it fare. At the end of last month Vodafone, the operator behind the new service and one of Romania’s largest telcos, began operations using the country’s 300 Vodafone Romania stores, participating retail outlets, and authorized agents.
M-Pesa operates via SMS phone messaging and offers the ability to make deposits and send and receive payments to people and businesses – potentially an attractive prospect to the third of Romanians who don’t have access to formal banking services. Across the country there are about 7 million people who transact mainly in cash. The just-launched mobile service is estimated to be accessible to about 6 million people, and Vodafone plans to increase its in-country distribution points to a total of 2,000 by the end of the year. Vodafone has 8.3 million clients out of Romania’s 21.3 million population, the vast majority being active mobile phone users. The mobile money market in Romania is currently underdeveloped.
Of course, just because M-Pesa has achieved significant uptake elsewhere doesn’t mean that will happen here, too. Since the service first launched in Kenya, new M-Pesa outfits have been established in a number of other countries including Tanzania, Afghanistan, and South Africa. Within the past twelve months, the service also launched in Egypt, India, Lesotho, and Mozambique. Across these markets results have been mixed, with operators struggling to emulate the immense success achieved in Kenya.
> Posted by Allison Ehrich Bernstein, Executive Communications Specialist, Accion
Quick: Pretend you’re a telecommunications operator in Africa. Which country would you choose for the launch of a new mobile money network?
Since the runaway success of Kenya’s M-Pesa system, banks and mobile service companies have been looking for the next big opportunity to bring cell phone-based financial services to a whole new client base. While we haven’t yet seen anything on the scale of M-Pesa, numerous companies (e.g. Easypasia in Pakistan, bKash in Bangladesh) have been chipping away at its number-one position.
So, what’s your pick?
You might say a fairly stable country that already has a reasonably strong banking sector, like Ghana. Or a high-population nation like Nigeria, or perhaps a place like Zimbabwe, where the financial system could use a jolt. And those wouldn’t be bad ideas.
Established African mobile-service providers Zain Group and MTN are taking a very different approach, however: they’re setting up mobile money networks in the world’s newest country, South Sudan.
Even if it weren’t a nation less than three years old, South Sudan might not strike the average observer as the next “it” spot for mobile money. Banking penetration in-country is negligible; there’s currently neither the central infrastructure nor leadership for it. And mobile penetration was somewhere around 13-15 percent in 2012, according to an International Finance Corporation study and other sources.
> Posted by Nate Gonzalez, Investment Officer, Accion Venture Lab
Last week this blog shared the news that Equity Bank applied for a mobile teleco operating license in Kenya, a development suggesting the bank’s interest in entering the country’s M-Pesa dominated mobile money market. In rapid succession, this weekend Kenya’s two largest telcos, Safaricom (who operates M-Pesa) and Airtel, announced that they are jointly buying-out yuMobile, the third-biggest telco in Kenya, and the most likely player to have partnered with Equity to enable it to enter the country’s telco-led mobile finance space.
> Posted by Center Staff
Equity Bank, Kenya’s largest bank by customer base, has applied for a license to operate a mobile telco business, a move that strongly suggests intent to enter the mobile money space. If realized, the bank and its 8 million customers could significantly disrupt M-Pesa’s current domination of the country’s market and help drive competition and innovation.
Given the type of license being sought, Equity Bank would not build a new telecommunications network, but would instead partner with one of the country’s prominent telcos and deploy services using this partner’s infrastructure.
Safaricom’s M-Pesa currently has a commanding hold on mobile money in Kenya with 21 million subscribers, covering roughly 75 percent of the country’s adult population. If Equity Bank’s customers were to subscribe to the in-house mobile money service in question, it would be positioned as the second largest in the country.
We look forward to the decision on Equity’s license and the action to follow.
Image credit: GSMA
> Posted by Adam Brown, International Development Discourse Group (IDDG) Member
The following post was originally published on the IDDG Blog.
Since 2008, the Afghan mobile phone provider, Roshan, has worked to bring mobile money services to Afghanistan. With the support of USAID, all four of Afghanistan’s major mobile phone providers are currently developing mobile money capabilities. The highly successful rollout of Kenya’s mobile money and banking service, M-Pesa, has spurred a flurry of similar startup efforts – over 72 in 42 countries. Many countries, however, have failed to experience the kind of success that M-Pesa achieved, and Afghanistan is no exception.
While the mobile money program in Afghanistan is in its nascent stages, the factors that helped M-Pesa to succeed are generally lacking. The most important of these are, 1) a dominant mobile carrier; 2) an economy that depends on long distance money transfers; and 3) customer trust in the system. The Afghan mobile phone market is too divided to create the kind of widespread network required to attain the critical mass necessary for a sustainable customer base. Further complicating the issue is the fact that Afghans generally do not rely on remittances, limiting the utility that could draw future users. To fix that, mobile money providers should include banking mechanisms early in their programs instead of tacked on only once a money transfer system is in place. However, trust in banks, especially since the Kabul Bank scandal, may be too low for Afghans to put their money into another bank-like mechanism. While mobile money is not destined to fail in Afghanistan, proponents of mobile banking and USAID should adjust their expectations for success, or at least be ready to address the above issues.
> Posted by Center Staff
The following post was originally published on the CGAP Microfinance Gateway.
In follow up to the Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum in October, Susy Cheston, Senior Advisor at the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI), shares key takeaways from the event and what the ongoing impact of this gathering will be leading up to the year 2020.
The Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum was a new event in the industry. Why did CFI organize this event?
Our overall goal for the FI2020 Global Forum was to put forward a vision of full financial inclusion for all by 2020, bringing together the leaders from the private and public sectors who can make that vision a reality. Part of the premise was that these different stakeholders don’t often talk with each other, and that there was value in enabling people who ordinarily work on separate aspects of financial inclusion to hear from each other and become more aware of how their own work fits into the broader picture.
Full financial inclusion by the year 2020 is an audacious goal. Did participants agree it was an achievable one?
Very much so. Participants were very optimistic, especially in light of recent innovations in technology, product development, and regulation.
Innocent Ephraim, M-PESA Product Manager, Vodacom, discusses some of the main concerns shared on the FI2020 Global Forum’s panel ‘Building Infrastructure & Spurring Innovation’, along with an overview of the challenges faced in rolling-out M-PESA’s product success in Kenya to Tanzania and South Africa.
Financial inclusion and technology innovation
The main concern of the forum panel was making sure that we bring in financial inclusion, and technology innovation is one of the key things for this. What I strongly believe in is the mobile money product itself. And mobile money products are being held up with a pillar, which is the agent distribution. Just like any other product that is mass distributed – Coca Cola and similar products – mobile money products need to be visible, available, and trusted. So once all of that is achieved, then innovation can chip in.
Listening to the customer
It’s important to listen to the customer because customers are the reason why we do this. We want to make sure that we don’t complicate their lives because the minute that we do that we already risk excluding them with our complicated innovation that we put in the mix. And we’ve got it wrong many times, we’ve learnt from our mistakes, and as a Product Manager, I know that it’s critical to listen to our customers.
Learning from mistakes
I’ll give you an example of a mistake we made with a product that we learnt from. We launched a life insurance product in Tanzania, and we expected millions to adopt it. We were actually shocked with the cultural behavior in Tanzania. Every customer that we communicated with to pick up the product kept saying: ‘You guys want me to die! Why do you want me to die?’ Here, we learnt that it’s not all about what we think is good for the customer. So we went back to the drawing board. Nevertheless, the product is used by hundreds of thousands in the country.
Now the team in Tanzania has done a study to see what type of insurance our customers need, and then reposition it. And one of the key findings from that study is that customers need a product they directly benefit from, health insurance was seen as ideal because then they feel they benefit out of it. They don’t want to buy an insurance cover that benefits somebody else – for example, the life insurance product where the customers felt it was just bad luck for them and that we just wanted them to pass away!
Kenya: the archetype of mobile payment
Kenya is a very good place to go and look at how mobile payments and technology has worked out. But you need to enter into different markets in different ways. If you look at Kenya, the population is dense and one agent would service hundreds of customers. When you go to Tanzania, where the population is much sparser, an agent would service fewer customers, and that makes it less attractive to an agent. Consequently, agents choose to invest in some other type of business instead of mobile money. (That’s only one of the differences between the two markets. A study has been done to highlight the differences of these two neighboring countries.) What we learnt in Tanzania is that we need to make sure that different products and services are integrated into the agent point-of-sale. So when you give an agent a tool to conduct mobile money services, allow them to do utility payment or airtime as well, so they actually aggregate from transactions from the same customer. That creates more incentive and profitability to the agent.
> Posted by Center Staff
It’s hard to replicate the learning value that comes from a good infographic. One such gem we were glad to recently come across is The Kenyan Journey to Digital Financial Inclusion from GSMA. Released shortly after GSMA’s 2013 Mobile Asia Expo, the infographic chronicles the development of mobile money in its flagship country of Kenya. Through the infographic you can trace how policy decisions and product innovations worked together to connect three quarters of the Kenyan people to electronic payments and other products. It shows clearly how one innovation paves the way for more, leading to a burst of innovations in the past two years.
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