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In 2007 Safaricom, the biggest mobile operator in Kenya, launched M-PESA, a service that allows money to be sent and received using mobile phones. It is used by 70% of the adult population and has become central to the economy: around 25% of Kenya’s GNP flows through it.
Similar schemes have had some success elsewhere. There has been a particular push in east Africa. Yet in many poor countries where mobile money should be flourishing, it isn’t.
Mobile-money services are especially useful in developing countries. A worker in the city can send money to his family in the village without having to waste a day travelling on a rickety bus. Indeed, he can pay his family’s household bills directly from his phone. It is safer too, nobody wants to carry wads of currency on public transport.
Mobile money also gives its users—many of whom are poor and have no access to banks—a way to save small amounts of money. Mobile transactions are more traceable than cash, making it harder for corrupt officials to embezzle undetected. And lately Kenya has discovered a further benefit: the success of M-PESA has provided the foundation for a group of start-ups in Nairobi that are building new products and services on top of it.
Not all countries need mobile money, of course. Rich countries, with cash machines, credit cards and Interact banking, have little use for it. And among developing countries, not all have Kenya’s specific mix of circumstances. Safaricom had a dominant market share when it launched M- PESA, giving the service a large base of potential customers. But there is also a bad reason why mobile money has failed to spread. Many of the poor countries that would most benefit from mobile money seem intent on keeping its suppliers out—mainly by insisting they should be regulated like banks.
Nobody disputes the idea that financial transactions need to be monitored. But there is also, equally clearly, a rather big difference between a cheap money-transfer system like M-PESA and a full lending bank like Citicorp. The security worries are usually fairly easily dealt with. Placing a limit on the size of transactions and the total balance that can be stored reduces the risk of mobile money being used to launder cash.
Another concern is consumer protection: cunning operators could steal cash. One compromise, which has been adopted in several African countries, is to get operators to form partnerships with banks.
Indeed, rather than fighting mobile money, governments should use it themselves.
How to solve the security problem of users’ money when using mobile money