Valuable Bits

It is many that are interested in m-banking, and the reason for the interest is varying from organization to organization. Some are interested because of new revenue streams, others for offering already existing costumers a better service and then there are the ones that are interested in what m-banking can do to increase financial inclusion. [...]

Previously we have mentioned that there is a new KYC legislation for mobile operators in Tanzania. It went active this summer and the companies have six months to register all their customers with some sort of identification or the subscription will be terminated. This is of course an opportunity to enroll large number of user [...]

As with all forms of systems people find their own way of using them that was not anticipated by the architect. One example of this in m-banking is direct deposits that is common in both Tanzania and Kenya.
Direct deposits works like this; when sending money, the sender finds an M-Pesa agent but instead of depositing [...]

When we formulated our thesis topic back in January we were convinced of an almost linear relationship between how long time an m-banking user had been active and how advanced that person’s usage had become. We thought it would start as a way of transferring money but evolve into more or less a savings account. [...]

Jim Rosenberg at CGAP was kind enough to invite us to the GSMA Mobile Money Summit conference in Barcelona last week. It was hosted by the GSMA with CGAP, DFID and IFC as co-organizers and the main focus of the conference was on the future role of MNOs, the regulatory issues and how to increase [...]

During our field studies in Tanzania we came across various ways of transferring money between people. Some of them have we already written about in this blog and some will be presented in coming blog posts or our coming paper.

One story that stands out a bit was a very specialized and popular money transfer system [...]