Valuable Bits

In some our latest blog posts we have mentioned the phenomenon of sending top-up voucher codes as a form of a money transfer and the more people we talk to the more apparent it becomes how common this way of sending still is,  despite the last year’s entries of formal services.
The process of using vouchers [...]

In regard to our first post about the agent model of Zain’s service Zap, we would like to clarify some things that we have found out since then.
Zain charges 150 TZS for each transfer, and as withdrawals and deposits both are transactions, Zain gets 150 TZS of the fee that the agent receives. To deposit [...]

We are thrilled to join the Mobile Money Transfer Africa Conference in Johannesburg on the 5-6 May. Due to a late speaker drop-out we have been invited to present our research findings so far even though the user studies will continue after as well.
The conference includes a great number of prominent guest from the business [...]

Our landlord, Lougano, told us a story that illustrates a couple of things when it comes to moving money in Tanzania. One of his friends asked him for a favor, the friend’s daughter wanted to visit the city and to stay at Lougano’s house during the winter holidays. The friend also asked if Lougano could [...]

After a meeting with Richard Kayombo, Deputy Director, at Tanzanian Communication Regulatory Authority yesterday we can conclude that there is much happening in the regulatory part of the theory we posted earlier. The 1st of July this year a new KYC legislation will be implemented, forcing all mobile network operators (MNOs) to register to whom [...]

Jonathan Donner recommended we should read Poor and Their Money by Stuart Rutherford. It’s written in 1999 but still gives a good introduction to why poor people need savings and which services that helps them to keep saving.
A common misconception of poor, which also I shared before reading the paper, is that poor people are [...]

We haven’t really started doing formal interviews with people about mobile banking services yet but still we take every opportunity to ask people if they use MMT services or if they send money in other ways.
The other day we talked to Musa who is a young tennis player. He didn’t use any of the available [...]

Banks have quite a big presence here in Dar and at least I don’t have a problem finding an ATM that accepts my Visa card. There is rarely a queue to the ATMs I use but this is far from the normal case in this city. To some ATMs and bank offices there are constantly [...]

This monday we had a meeting with Jacques Voogt, head of M-Pesa at Vodacom. We talked about his work and visions regarding the service. The differences between Kenya and Tanzania came up quite often. This country is second out to implement the m-banking service designed by Vodafone, and the huge numbers of users we’ve seen [...]