The M-PESA money-transfer service, operated by Safaricom, Kenya’s largest mobile operator, is used by 9.5 million people, or 23 percent of the population, and transfers the equivalent of 11 percent of Kenya’s GDP each year.
See presentation for a description of how it works.
The basic idea of M-PESA is that the 100,000 small retailers in Kenya who already sell mobile-phone airtime, in the form of scratch cards, can also register to be mobile-money agents, taking in and paying out cash. More than 17,600 retailers have signed up as M-PESA agents—far outnumbering Kenya’s 840 bank branches. When a customer is registered with the system, paying in cash involves exchanging physical money for the virtual sort, called “e-float”, which is credited to his mobile-money account. E-float can then be transferred to other users by mobile phone, and exchanged for cash by the recipient, who visits another agent.
read more here
Showing posts with label M-PESA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label M-PESA. Show all posts
Sunday, January 30, 2011
M-PESA is the Model for Perhaps 60 Other Ventures
Labels:
M-PESA,
mobile banking
Gary Kim has been a communications industry analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology. These days he especially studies changing business models and strategies.He speaks frequently at conferences and spends quite a lot of time organizing conferences and content as well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
"Tokens" are the New "FLOPS," "MIPS" or "Gbps"
Modern computing has some virtually-universal reference metrics. For Gemini 1.5 and other large language models, tokens are a basic measure...
-
We have all repeatedly seen comparisons of equity value of hyperscale app providers compared to the value of connectivity providers, which s...
-
It really is surprising how often a Pareto distribution--the “80/20 rule--appears in business life, or in life, generally. Basically, the...
-
Who gets to use spectrum, and concerns about interference from other users, now appears to be an issue for Google’s Project Loon in India. ...