MOBILE WORLD: Mobile Money Faces Developed-World Challenge

   By Kim Hjelmgaard 
 

Instances of the so-called tail wagging the dog abound.

Add mobile-money services, the idea that you can make financial transactions of all kinds using only your phone, to that club.

The technological brawn, sophisticated banking and widespread financial literacy seemingly required to deploy mobile-money programs are, of course, heavily concentrated in the developed world.

Yet it's in places lacking that infrastructure, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where the idea has actually taken hold. Take Kenya, for example.

According to the World Economic Forum's "Mobile Financial Services Development Report," roughly 10% of Kenya's 40 million people use mobile-money initiatives like Safaricom Ltd.'s (SAF.NR) M-Pesa. The branchless banking platform enables users, armed with only their mobile phones, to pay bills, deposit and withdraw money as well as transfer funds to M-Pesa's users and non-users alike.

Services such as M-Pesa's work by using a subscriber identification module, or SIM card, which store personal data and network information.

Broadly speaking, the portfolio of financial services that fall under the rubric of mobile money range from paying for goods and services to transferring funds to receiving an overseas remittance.

Like other examples of companies and nations that have seen high adoption rates for mobile money, including MTN Group Ltd. (MTN.JO) in Uganda, Vodacom Group Ltd. (VOD.JO) in Tanzania, Smart in the Philippines and True Move in Thailand, relatively few people in Kenya--10% the WEF report estimates--have access to traditional banking services, according to Greenwich Consulting, a telecoms consultancy.

But they do have access to SIM cards via their mobile phones.

Jean-Marie Letort, a partner at Greenwich, said: "Of the approximately 130 mobile-money schemes that have been launched to date, there really are very few successes. And almost all of them are in emerging markets."

Letort explained that the concept of mobile money generally works best right now in places where people do not have bank accounts but do have phones.

He also said that while many in the global telecoms industry are beginning to talk about whether the West can replicate the success of emerging markets, there is a bottleneck in the developed world that revolves around the adoption of a preferred radio technology called NFC, or near-field communications.

NFC allows the wireless transfer of data over very short distances.

While NFC is not exactly new to the industry, it is seen as a key component of a fledgling mobile-payment ecosystem in the more mature markets of the U.S. and Europe that are juggling the competing needs of banks, retailers, operators, manufacturers and others.

"In the developed world, everyone in the industry is aggressively talking about launching the digital wallet that can be used in day-to-day life: to sign up for insurance, to access micro-finance, for paying utilities or your taxes," he said. "The first step is equipping merchants with NFC."

On Monday, the U.K.'s Vodafone Group PLC (VOD) announced that it signed an agreement with Visa Inc. (V) that will permit 398 million Vodafone customers in more than 30 countries to make payments for goods and services with their phones. The underlying technology for this deal will be NFC.

-By Kim Hjelmgaard; 415-439-6400; [e-mail]