Today, we count 34 countries where there are at least 2 mobile money services for the unbanked. In these markets, MNOs launch mobile money not to differentiate themselves, but because they don’t want to lag behind their competitors and lose customers.

With competition emerging in the mobile money space, we now see battles over price, but also attempts to better adjust services to the needs of unbanked customers and to increase the quality of service.

In Rwanda and Tanzania, Tigo illustrates that it is possible for operators to compete successfully in mobile money even when they have been slow to market and/or are not the market leader in the mobile business

The 2011 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey has identified Rwanda as one of the fastest growing markets for mobile money. In a recent blog post, I explained how MTN Rwanda is now emerging as a new success story in the mobile money space. Two years after the launch of MTN MobileMoney in February 2010, MTN boasted 415,000 registered customers. MTN has a market share of 70% in Rwanda in terms of number of GSM connections. However, the competition over mobile money is fierce.

Tigo launched its mobile money service Tigo cash in May 2011 in Rwanda. It managed to leverage the high level of awareness of mobile money among the population – largely due to MTN’s marketing efforts over the past 2 years – to sign up over 260,000 customers in just one year. This is more than MTN one year after the launch of MTN MobileMoney. Airtel, which became the third operator in Rwanda in March, is also planning to launch its mobile money service by the end of the year.

Vodacom, the dominant mobile operator in Tanzania, launched M-PESA in April 2008. In comparison to the extremely rapid adoption of M-PESA in Kenya, the service grew more slowly across the border.[1] However, Vodacom was tenacious, and by September 2011 it was able to announce that there were more than 2 million active M-PESA customers in Tanzania—one-fifth of Vodacom’s mobile base.

In the meantime, however, competition in the mobile money market had emerged. Zain introduced a rival offering, Zap, in February 2009, a service which was re-launched as Airtel Money in October 2010; Zantel launched ZPesa in 2007 and re-launched it in May 2010; and Tigo brought Tigo Cash to market in September 2010.

The 2011 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey allows shows that Tigo was able to capture significant share from Vodacom during the first half of 2011. In a countermove, Vodacom recently announced an across-the-board reduction in fees for M-PESA.

Tigo’s early success in Tanzania and Rwanda are important, because it illustrates that it is possible for operators to compete successfully in mobile money even when they have been slow to market and/or are not the market leader in the mobile business.

In Pakistan, competition between Telenor and UBL has led them to differentiate their product offering

There are two mobile money services in Pakistan: Easypaisa, which is offered by Tameer Microfinance Bank, in which Telenor Pakistan holds a 51% ownership stake, and Omni, a service of United Bank Limited. Both services allow customers to transact without first opening an account; for Telenor, the third mobile operator in Pakistan by market share, this decision was motivated by a desire to serve customers without a Telenor SIM.

Mobile money is catching on in Pakistan very quickly: according to the State Bank of Pakistan, transaction volumes have increased from 3.5 million transactions in Q1 2011 to 20.6 million in Q4 2011.

The data show that Easypaisa and Omni have highly differentiated offerings. Easypaisa dominates when it comes to [2] Bulk payments represented 18% of the total number of payments it processed in June 2011—while Telenor had not conducted bulk payments up until June.

[1] “What makes a Successful Mobile Money Implementation? Learning from M-PESA in Kenya and Tanzania”, GSMA, http://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/mpesa_case_study9983.pdf

[2] “Case Study: United Bank Limited Supports Cash Transfer Payments,” Bankable Frontier Associates (http://www.cgap.org/gm/document-1.9.50409/CGAP_UBL_case_study_Jan_2011.pdf)

In this blog post, we feature MTN MobileMoney in Rwanda, one of the fastest-growing services across the world.

A few months ago, MMU travelled to Rwanda, and what we saw was really exciting: just like in Kenya, every person we talked to knew about mobile money and was a customer of either MTN MobileMoney or Tigo Cash, the two mobile money services available in Rwanda; and just like in Nairobi, where M-PESA agents are ubiquitous, mobile money agents were springing up everywhere in Kigali—often several in the same street.

MTN MobileMoney was launched in February 2010 in Rwanda. Two years after launch, it boasted 415,000 registered customers, and over 170,000 active customers—6% of MTN’s mobile base.

We had the opportunity to interview Albert Kinuma, who heads MTN MobileMoney in Rwanda, at our last Working Group. In this video, he shares the story of MobileMoney in his country and gives his perspective on what the drivers of their early success have been. Key success factors include:

• An enabling regulatory environment: MTN is licensed directly by the National Bank of Rwanda to offer MobileMoney, which helped MTN bring MobileMoney to market quickly. Moreover, customer-due-diligence rules enable quick registration and activation.
• A focus on understanding and meeting customer needs: MTN invested heavily in market research to understand how Rwandans were likely to use the service, pilot testing with 200 customers and then listening closely to their feedback. They then fed these insights to the agency responsible for devising their marketing campaign to ensure that it would be relevant to the local market.
• A large dedicated team: a relatively large staff of 18 MTN employees manages the MobileMoney operation.
• A happy channel: MTN has carefully managed the growth of its agent network in order to ensure that agents are satisfied with the return that they earn from serving as MobileMoney agents. The average number of customers per agent is an indicator that management tracks closely; as of June 2011, there were 259 active MobileMoney customers per active agent in Rwanda.

Download The 2011 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey

Watch the interview with Maarten Boute, CEO of Digicel Haiti and Isaac Nsereko, CMO of MTN Uganda who candidly share the challenges they have faced in building mobile money services.

• What was the business case to launch mobile money from the C-level perspective?
• What are the battles that take place at the C-level to decide how to allocate resources to mobile money services?
• How are resource allocation battles won for mobile money?
• What is your perspective on the right organizational structure for mobile money?
• What could have been done differently? What are the lessons learned?
• What is the time frame to achieve success in mobile money?
• What is the most difficult challenge mobile money poses to the C level executive?
• What advice would you give to mobile money managers when dealing with their C-Level team?

In Uganda, the majority of senior citizens live in rural areas where 85% of the active population is engaged in agriculture and only 7.1% of them have access to pensions. Like many seniors around the globe, they experience poverty, ill-health and malnutrition.  Recently, the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development launched the Senior Citizens’ Grant under a cash transfer scheme called “Social Assistance Grants for Empowerment” or SAGE.  MTN Uganda has partnered with SAGE to deliver these funds to the beneficiaries via MTN’s MobileMoney platform. Beneficiaries will receive 23,000 Ugandan Shillings on a monthly basis and the project hopes to reach 95,000 households over the next five years. Beneficiaries who do not have mobile phones will be given SIM cards which they will be able to use at MTN’s EasyTalk call boxes where Mobile Money agents will be stationed.

Across the border in Kenya, where the “informal sector” term was first used back in 1971  The  “Jua Kali”—in Swahili “hot sun”—are  self-employed informal workers.  Statistics from the Kenyan Ministry of Labour estimate that only 15% of the 10 million workers in the country are enrolled in retirement benefit schemes, and that 70% of them without the scheme were jua kali.

Earlier this year, the National Jua Kali Cooperative Society and the Jua Kali Association launched a new pension product with can be funded through M-PESA and Airtel Money. Users can now save for retirement via the Pay Bill feature starting at Kshs. 20 (US $0.24). This product has allowed Jua Kali to double the number of pension accounts in only six months and is targeting 8.5 million people involved in the informal sector.

Mobile money can greatly reduce the transaction costs in low income pension schemes making them more viable.  The Jua Kali Association has plans to expand this service to the East African region and we will be writing more on these developments in the future.

But collecting these reports, consolidating the data, summarizing the results in a way that is insightful and actionable (including a system for flagging problems until they are resolved) is a challenge. That’s why I was impressed by a new tool that’s recently been rolled out to the trade development representatives (TDRs) employed by MTN to support the MobileMoney agent network in Uganda. Each TDR carries an inexpensive Android handset with an application installed that replaces a paper checklist (such as the ones that TDRs employed by Top Image in Kenya use when visiting M-PESA agents for Safaricom). The TDR can quickly complete the electronic form while at the agent shop. Not only do TDRs use the form to report on an agents’ performance; they can also highlight issues which need attention but which they cannot resolve on the spot, such as “agent re-training required.”

When they’ve finished filling out the form and the TDR hits submit, the report is uploaded electronically and a database, which contains every report on every agent outlet, is updated. In this case, that database is hosted by Salesforce.com, which makes it easy to manipulate the data and create reports that are useful to management; a list of agents who require re-training, for example, could be forwarded to the point person for scheduling attendance at training sessions.

This system not only provides management with better visibility into the workings of its agent network; it also provides better visibility into productivity of its field representatives. Reports from agent shops are geo-tagged, making it significantly more difficult for a TDR to, say, file reports on agents he hasn’t actually visited.

This system was created for MTN by AppLab, an initiative of the Grameen Foundation. Their team has calculated that the cost of deploying these handsets pays for itself in seven months. How? The time that TDRs would otherwise spend doing manual data entry and data collation if they were using a paper-based system can now be spent focused on what’s most important: monitoring, and improving, agent performance.

At a recent MMU Working Group, the CEO of Top Image in Kenya described the importance of agent monitoring. Examples of checklists that several agent-mediated financial services use around the world to track the performance of their agents can be found in the appendices of CGAP’s Agent Management Toolkit.

Mobile Money in Uganda is now starting to evolve from its initial infancy stage. MTN launched MTN MobileMoney in 2009, presently Uganda’s most successful deployment with over 1 million registered customers (out of 9.9 million mobile subscribers) and a network of 1,500 agents. While the initial mobile money offering focused on domestic money transfers, it is now expanding and it is imperative for MNOs and other stakeholders to understand the financial needs to its users.

In terms of current use, domestic money transfers largely dominate and are mainly used to support immediate family members. A large majority of respondents found this service to be cheap or average.

The respondents also used mobile money to buy airtime, pay television bills, school fees or tuition. While some of these services are new, they are perceived to offer important benefits to the users: speed (for 78% of the respondents), practicality (69%), and an affordable price (68%). However, a few concerns were raised regarding agents’ liquidity (35%), the risk to lose one’s mobile phone (and hence one’s mobile money) (31%), and long queues at agents’ location (29%).

In addition, while transferring domestic money is the most widely used service, the respondents highlighted three other services which they perceive to be more important: 1) airtime purchase or top-up 2) paying for transportation 3) Settling of hospital bills. These findings point to interesting potential scenarios for the extension of the reach of services based on mobile money. Besides, considering that hospital/clinic bills are infrequent transactions, integrating mobile money services in the health sector appears to be very promising: “Perhaps one key aspect to take away for MNOs and innovators who would like to build solutions on top of mobile money is the fact that the infrequent transactions tend to involve more money than more frequent transactions, and as such users might be willing to pay bigger premiums for the convenience of completing them.”[2]

Uganda is still an early market for mobile money. Similarly to M-PESA when it started in Kenya, but contrary to expectation, the mobile money services in Uganda seem to attract mostly banked customers (72.6% of respondents). This highlights the current limitations of the coverage of the formal financial sector in Uganda, indicating that banks could hugely benefit from partnering with MNOs in terms of customer satisfaction. Indeed, 71% of the respondents stressed the fact that they would like a linkage between their mobile money account and their formal bank account. We can also envision that mobile money could play an interesting role in the development of a saving culture amongst the unbanked population.

Despite respondents being more affluent than the average Ugandan, only 30% had sole ownership of their mobile phone. For 70% of the respondents, sharing their mobile phone also means sharing their mobile wallet, even though those they share it with cannot access the wallets’ content. What are the implications in terms of mobile money adoption and usage? It would be interesting to study whether or not there is a correlation between the number of active mobile money customers and the percentage of sole ownership of handsets.

[1] Applab, Makerere University, Stockholm, University and Mid-Sweden University.

[2] “Mobile Money Use in Uganda: A Preliminary Study“

Roughly six months after this event, MTN has now launched MobileMoney in Cameroon, making it the first mobile network operator in the Economic Community of Central African States, to launch a mobile money service. To understand more about their deployment and overall strategy, I recently caught up with Peter Ndongla, the director of MTN Cameroon’s MobileMoney to gain some insights into their service and their journey towards regulatory approval.

GSMA:  Can you tell us about the process you used to engage with your regulator and bank partner?

PD: The process was challenging. Our initial application with Ecobank in 2008 was not successful given that mobile money at this point was a very new concept, and our bank partner found it difficult to engage with BEAC. Back then, mobile money was new, and the risk and complexity in their view was high.  Therefore, BEAC officials decided they needed to learn more about the industry before they gave us the green light. We also had discussions with Citibank, but given that their business focus in the country is not on consumer banking, they found that mobile money was out of their scope of work.  At the end, Afriland First Bank came to us and we found in them the right partner to go ahead with the application and eventual launch.

GSMA: Why did you choose Afriland First Bank as your partner?

PD: In the initial stages, given the regulatory hurdles we had to overcome, we found that some banks wanted to lead the deployment, leaving us solely as a service provider. We didn’t think this was an attractive option given the resources we had already invested into this project, and the negative impact this could have on MTN. Eventually, we found in Afriland, a bank partner which was interested in the business, but allowed us to be at the forefront and focus on the core areas. MTN is responsible for management of the technical platform, the marketing and distribution network, while Afriland is in charge of holding the float and the issuance of e-money, which guarantees and ensures the service is in compliance with the law.

GSMA: What role did Afriland play and what role did MTN play in the application process?

PD: In terms of the application process, the advantage that Afriland had was that it had already received a license for a similar mobile money service called I-Card.  I-Card is an e-wallet based on chip-and -pin technology which also serves as a means to secure your money. The only difference between these two services was that Icard was using  a smart card platform, and our  mobile money  service was to use the mobile channel as the medium of transaction.  Due to the similarities between these two services, BEAC recognized that there was no need in issuing a separate license, and  asked Icard to contact MTN Cameroon and  provide them with the technology specifications  to make sure the platforms posed no further risks to the system. Once they were satisfied, they gave us the green light to go ahead.

GSMA: What was your experience participating in the roundtable in February?

PD: Yes. The roundtable played a big role in our relationship with the regulator.  After the roundtable, BEAC felt more comfortable with the various models involved in the deployment of mobile money, and we feel that this was a turning point for them in their understanding of the roles of both banks and MNOs in the deployment of a mobile money service.

GSMA: What have been the developments since the roundtable?

PD: After some time, BEAC approved our service, and have now informed us that they are now ready to examine and approve mobile money applications in other countries in the Central African region.  It’s been a long and arduous process, but in my view the regulatory roundtable was a turning point as it allowed them to see the different models and partnerships involved.  In a way, I feel MTN Cameroon effectively paved the way for the industry in the Central African region.  In addition, we feel that the usefulness of this forum highlights the need to host similar events in French-speaking West Africa in order to push the industry forward.

GSMA: What questions did BEAC have?

PD: BEAC was concerned about security and felt that they needed to understand more about the risks inherent to the system.   In addition, BEAC felt more comfortable with having the bank lead the license process at the beginning, and were concerned about the possible snowball effect that the issuance of a license to MTN could have in the region.  They were worried that other MNOs would then follow in applying for licenses and felt they needed to make sure they understood the service well before going ahead.

GSMA: Yours is the first service to launch in the Central Africa region – how is the customer need for mobile money here the same or different than in East Africa?

PD:  In East Africa, MTN Uganda has been working very hard at getting their deployment off the ground.  In Cameroon, we have realized that mobile money needs a lot of education, and this is something we see as a key learning for us. We feel the need to be in the field, educating potential customers about how mobile money can satisfy their needs.  Advertising and Marketing are key aspects to any mobile money deployment, and we need to market not just to potential users, but to the users themselves so they truly understand and benefit from the service.  In Cameroon, we see a bigger need for bill and salary payments than P2P.  At the moment, people have to queue for several hours to pay their bills, or receive their salaries at the bank; therefore we expect this to be one of the major areas of value for our customers.

GSMA: How will the MobileMoney service in Cameroon be the same or different from other countries where MTN has launched?

PD:    First, we are going to try to incentivise people to buy airtime with mobile money.  By doing this we want people to learn how to use the service and from there graduate to the rest of the functionalities the mobile wallet can offer.  Once we roll out, we expect to provide the following services:

• P to Cash: sending money from your MTN MobileMoney account to a third party for collection in cash (using a reference and a pin code).
• P2P:  sending money between MTN MobileMoney subscribers.
• Airtime top-up: Purchase of airtime from your MTN MobileMoney account for oneself or a third person.
• Bill and Merchant Payments: purchase of goods from authorized retailers and utility suppliers.

Registration, deposit, withdrawal (P to cash) and airtime purchase will be free but there will be charges for the other services.

GSMA: How many customers do you estimate that MTN MobileMoney in Cameroon will have in a year’s time?

PD:  Our expectation is that we will be able to sign up around 100,000 customers every month for the first 12 months.

GSMA: Thank you Peter.

“These and our previously announced MMU grants are being used to significantly accelerate acceptance and adoption of mobile money services for base of the pyramid customers globally,” said Gavin Krugel, Director GSMA. “The operators are working to reduce the infrastructure gap that exists in rural areas and are making mCommerce more accessible, convenient and affordable to customers.”

“Mobile money can change the lives of unbanked people for the better. Mobile money services bring genuine and immediate benefits, by helping people carry out the kind of daily transactions and remittances we take for granted, or by providing monetary tools to help improve a small business or even set one up. For most it will be the first time they have had a financial identity – this is a profound and positive change,” Eden Zoller, Principal Analyst, Ovum.

According to research, only 13 per cent of the population of Bangladesh has a bank account, which means that upwards of 130m people have no access to formal financial services. MMU funds have been awarded to two participants in Bangladesh, AKTEL (a joint venture company between Axiata Group Berhad of Malaysia and NTT DoCoMo, Japan) and Grameenphone Ltd. In November, AKTELwill launch a bill payment service (through mobile) for electricity subscribers, which has been awarded by the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) to AKTEL. Under the mCommerce initiative, AKTEL is introducing SMS and IVR based services with the aim of assisting financially constrained rural communities who wish to mobilise money in an easier and faster manner. Grameenphone aims to improve penetration of financial services to rural areas to enable migrant workers in urban locations to remit funds to their families based in those rural communities.

By reaching the underbanked, the unbanked and those financially handicapped by high interest rates from existing services, Grameenphone and AKTEL are enabling individuals to create financial identities which will benefit the whole community. With regulatory approval, the implementation of mobile money services will enable Bangladeshis to take advantage of more efficient, less time consuming and more secure new services and in the long run help alleviate poverty in Bangladesh.

Sri Lankan-based Dialog plans to introduce mCommerce services to the North and North-Central provinces of Sri Lanka. Dialog will focus on regions deficient in financial services infrastructure, and on initiatives to enhance people’s lives by providing a range of mCommerce services at affordable prices including utility bill payment, person-to-person money transfers, over-the-counter payments and cash withdrawal/deposits.

Less than 10 per cent of the working population of Cameroon has a bank account due to poor banking infrastructure and low penetration but also, as the majority of Camaroonians are self employed, they do not have the payslips that are required to open accounts. MTN’s MobileMoney service, which was created by partnering with a large microfinance network, will reach out to the farmers, workers and small entrepreneurs where money transfer can be used for peer to peer, account to cash and cash to cash payments. Subject to regulatory approval, MobileMoney will also be used to pay utility bills which can be received directly to mobile phones and payment made instantly.

According to research, 60 per cent of the Ugandan populace does not have access to any type of financial services and 71 per cent save in ‘secret’ places such as under the bed. MTN Uganda will help connect the 86 per cent of people who live and work in rural areas to banking services, paying particular interest to small-scale traders and those who buy and sell agricultural produce. MTN services highlight the simplicity and security of mobile money transfer, which will narrow the gap between rural and urban communities and enable merchants to use mobile money transfer to reduce transport costs and to help them to avoid being the target for opportunistic thieves.

Vodacom Tanzania has an established and growing M-PESA customer base, however lack of disposable cash on the part of the agent network is seen as a major obstacle to increase agent e-money float holding and hence transaction volumes. The MMU grant will support a project to enable Vodacom Tanzania to provide a geographically wider line of e-money credit or revolving credit to increase the total float holding value within the M-PESA agent network. This additional investment will see customer access and usage improve as entrepreneurs are empowered to invest in the M-PESA business opportunity and grow the agent network.

Share your thoughts below.

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Paul Leishman: Can you provide a high level overview of MTN Mobile Money in Ghana?

Bruno Akpaka: MTN launched the MTN Mobile Money service in Ghana at the end of July and already have over 20,000 customers to date and around 1,200 Mobile Money Authorized Merchants across the country. As we had expected, we do face some challenges in introducing a new service like this in an area where the informal sector is so prevalent. The main challenge being that it is not the normal practice of Ghanaians to carry identification with them. This is a result of Ghanaians living and working in a safe environment where it is not required to show an official ID document at every street corner – people instead might have things like a work ID, NHIS (National Health Insurance Scheme) document, voter ID, etc. Even so, in general they don’t carry it around. This results in registration having to be planned because a copy of the ID must be taken to register.

Paul: In terms of marketing activities, which types of things have you found to be most successful?

Bruno: We drive communication through below the line advertising for the most part however we do some above the line advertisements to create awareness, and after only two months the level of awareness has probably exceeded our expectations. We believe our tag for Mobile Money is most appropriate- and that is ‘Minsa Aka Minsa Aka’, which means ‘I’ve got in it’. A certain number of my colleagues have shared that wherever they are, whenever they give good news out everyone shouts ‘Minsa Aka’. So we think we have reached our goal in terms of creating awareness.

Paul: How confident are you that Mobile Money will take off in Ghana as it has in Kenya?

Bruno: There is definitely a lot of interest in Mobile Money – but we still need to do a lot of education; this includes the customer, as well as the banks and the merchants. Financial services inclusion is still new in that segment of the market and we feel the growth will be exponential as consumers become more familiar with how the service works and the benefits thereof. When we hear about the success in Kenya, it did not come overnight or in just 2 months! So we know education is a critical first step.

Each country is unique with its own set of cultures, values and practices which will affect the popularity of the service. As an example, the informal business sector in Ghana is mainly unbanked – and in fact that segment is afraid of the word bank. ‘Bank’ to them, means ‘people in dark suits, black ties, very serious and a lot of fees.’ On the other hand they have been early adopters of mobiles because they use them to do business. They see the mobile as a tool to make profits.

Paul: Where can customers register for MTN Mobile Money?

Bruno: They can go to our MTN service centres or any branch of our 9 bank* partners, and some other selected registration points (which are Mobile Money Authorized Merchants that have the facilities to register customers in real time).

Paul: And how does a registration take place?

Bruno: It either takes place using the merchant’s phone (a specific type of handset is required by the merchant) or the internet. Using the phone method, registration merchants simply take a picture of the customer as well as their ID card and then send both by MMS to our servers for registration.

Paul: Given that the only merchant requirement to register a new customer is a specific type of handset, it seems like you could put a big effort into customer registration, correct?

Bruno: That’s right, but we are still growing very cautiously so as to ensure that we can focus on ensuring the customers we do register are fully comfortable with the process and service. Let us remember that this is a financial services product. When it comes to finance, customers are more conservative than when it comes to airtime. So yes, for now we’re being cautious in registering too many customers too early. We want to lead with below the line advertising to make people aware that we will be coming to the community to register customers. By then, they should be more comfortable with the process/service.

Paul: What about using the service? What are the responsibilities of merchants?

Bruno: Customers need to show a valid photo ID to perform any transaction at the Merchant point. Details of the ID and transaction are captured by the Merchant’s Account handler on the Merchant Transaction sheet and signed by the customer to acknowledge the transaction.

All Merchants are approved by partner banks after completing KYC requirements. Their details are then captured on the Mobile Money platform and a wallet created for their transactions. This is followed by training, loading of e-cash, branding and commencement of business. Merchants earn cash commissions on all transactions.

Paul: You have partnered with 9 banks in Ghana. What’s the rationale behind this decision?

Bruno: First of all, it was a requirement from the Bank of Ghana to have a minimum of 3 banks as partners. In fact, the Bank of Ghana guidelines are very clear – merchants must be backed by a bank and thus more banks should also provide us with more merchants. Second, banks were very enthusiastic about the value proposition as they see it as a great opportunity to reach the unbanked population – which is something they haven’t been able to do for a while. Also they want to benefit from the float that backs each Mobile Money user’s wallet. And thirdly, they want to leverage on the MTN network. This means that even though merchants are selling an MTN Mobile Money service, it is the bank that is vetting the merchant and thus having a conversation with prospective new customers.

Paul: So you have 1,200 merchants, each of whom has a bank account with one of your 9 bank partners. How do you decide which of the 9 partners will bank a specific merchant?

Bruno: It really isn’t our call. Rather, we leave it to the banks to express interest in a specific region, and in a specific district. So if I look at a particular region and Bank A says that they have a strategy to be very aggressive there because of XYZ reason, then that bank will be tasked with banking the merchants in that area and signing them up as MTN Mobile Money merchants. In some other regions, banks may compete with one another and no one bank will take the single lead.

There is a big incentive for the banks to sign on Merchants who sell Mobile Money – the number of accounts opened will be reported in their Annual Reports, they get access to a wider distribution network and finally these same Merchants can be used to open a savings account with the bank, dispatch ATM cards, etc. They incentivize Merchants in this regard. Thus both the merchant and the bank benefits from participating in Mobile Money.

Paul: How has your experience been working with the Bank of Ghana?

Bruno: The Bank of Ghana has been most co-operative and supportive of MTN’s Mobile Money Initiative.

Paul: Thanks, Bruno.

*Partner banks – CAL Bank; Fidelity Bank; Ecobank; Guarantee Trust Bank; Intercontinental Bank; Merchant Bank; Stanbic; United Bank for Africa; Zenith Bank