According to the report released by research company Pyramid, the African market provides fertile ground for the continued development of mobile money services. This is due to the fact that in many developing regions of the African continent, the availability of formal financial services is limited to certain geographic and income ranges, often leaving the majority of the population to rely on unreliable and costly informal channels.
However, factors such as regulatory schemes which vary from country to country and low literacy rates (as sa possible determinant of text usage) could hinder adoption of mobile transfer services; the same effect could also be generated by the existence of widespread and low-cost alternative money transfer services in the region, the same report points out.
Of the mobile financial services programs currently operating in Africa, Safaricom’s M-Pesa service has witnessed a significant expansion in Kenya. Developed by Vodafone, the service enables mobile phone subscribers with limited access to a bank account to send and receive money via their mobile phones.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now