Comments on: Will The Real Payment Disruptor Please Stand Up

By: Kenyan mobile money sparks inflation fears | SmartPlanet

Kenyan mobile money sparks inflation fears | SmartPlanet — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:00:30 +0000

[...] people.Â M-Pesa was able to leapfrog existing institutions and regulations. As Kenyan tech expert Erik Hersman put it in his blog: Itâ€s a good thing that Mpesa happened in Africa. It offered a new way of thinking about money [...]

By: GSMSavvy

GSMSavvy — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:23:53 +0000

What is the future of M-PESA ? Is it really going to revolutionize? Maybe become an independent worldwide company offering mobile money transfer services? If then, what kind of servers will it use? 14 million users and beating Western Union’s worldwide transactions is really something that might need servers imported from another planet.

By: Matt Krueger

Matt Krueger — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 01:34:37 +0000

Hey Erik – Thanks for the response and the blog post link. You’re right – I had forgotten about utility payments which are probably substantial.

I’m no longer working with Equity Bank and moved back to the States – I see that you’re actually in the Bay area as well at the moment. Let me know if you have any spare time while you’re here, I’d love to meet up and chat about E Africa tech, what’s going on here in the Valley and how I can stay involved.

Thanks,
Matt

By: Kenya fan

Kenya fan — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:26:54 +0000

Business Daily in Kenya reports that Visa has launched a cross-border mobile money transfer platform, available to all mobile users irrespective of their network – going after Safaricom’s M-Pesa? http://www.nation.co.ke/business/news/Visa+to+start+mobile+money+transfer+/-/1006/1330780/-/r7683rz/-/

By: HASH

HASH — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:09:14 +0000

Good questions Matt.

1. Mpesa is more of a transfer service than payment service, true. However, it is used for many types of payments, even if not in the very lucrative b2b or traditional b2c. Instead, those are more p2p payments.

For instance, I bought 20,000 Ksh of goods from someone last week. He emailed me an invoice, I paid him via Mpesa, and neither of us wasted the fuel (and time) to meet in person. Most Kenyans pay for electricity and water via Mpesa, so that is a rather large monthly payment made by a lare percentage of the population.

2. Yes, I do, but only AFTER it’s success in Kenya. That was proven by 2009 and as MJ left the helm in 2010, it was the perfect time for a pivot by Vodafone on making Mpesa an independent entity. It would be the right product and the right leader for it.

By: Matt Krueger

Matt Krueger — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:52:21 +0000

I agree that there shouldn’t be any mobile payments discussion without at least mentioning M-Pesa and nodding to its success. To that end, it was nice to see that Vinod Khosla did just that in his recent TC post: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/19/unhyped-internet-and-mobile/. (Of course, he should know about Kenya’s mobile money what with Khosla’s investment in the outstanding team at Kopo Kopo…)

Two questions though:
~M-Pesa is more of a money transfer service today, in all honesty, than a payments service, no? I’m guessing that the VAST majority of their transactions are P2P; I never did see many people at Uchumi or Deacon stores using M-Pesa… and with the TX cost (30/=) M-Pesa isn’t positioning itself for informal payments. At least not yet. That isn’t to diminish the amazing success it has been – it’s just that the success has been as a transfer service more than a payment service.
~Do you really think that M-Pesa could have been successful as an independent entity? It seems that its success owes a great deal to being embedded on the SIM cards of a dominant MNO…

Great stuff as usual!

By: Payments: The More Things Change… | Mobile Money Exchange

Payments: The More Things Change… | Mobile Money Exchange — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:34:07 +0000

[...] US and Europe, those parts of the world without credit card infrastructure (especially Kenya) are seeing real innovation. And Tim Harford one-upped them both by reminding us that cash is still around and wonâ€t go [...]

By: HASH

HASH — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:55:22 +0000

Credit is easy to layer on to something like Mpesa, if you’re Safaricom (or Vodafone). It’s just another feature for them.

By: Wayan

Wayan — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:04:06 +0000

Credit (not cards) is the 900 gorilla of finance. M-PESA doesn’t allow for credit. The service that does will dwarf all current mMoney services. Just as a point of reference, the global bond market is 2x the size of all the stock markets.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:26:30 +0000

I think its only a matter of time until someone highlights the fact that mPesa does not segment out its market, but rather covers everybody from wealthiest urbanites to poorest villagers compared to the Silicon Valley payment innovations which are usually tier based and often leave out the bottom tiers which also happens to be largest in size.