This note reviews the Spanish experience with regulating the competition aspects of new mobile payment networks in the absence of formal technical standards. The saga is in two parts, as the strategy of the early movers, dominant telco Telefonica and leading bank BBVA, changed radically in...

This paper presents ten key service design features that have facilitated the rapid adoption and active use of M-PESA in Kenya. These relate to branding and messaging, ease of use, consistency of customer experience, agent monitoring, instantaneous customer registration, free deposits, ability...

Provides a formal analysis of the economic drivers for branchless banking solutions. It exposes the design trade-offs that occur at the each of the key layers of service: the retail network (transaction acquisition), payments network (transaction aggregation and routing) and account/service...

This report summarizes the intent, activities, outputs and key lessons from an ambitious program of field research which sought to capture vividly and succinctly the essence of how ordinary people think about the management of their money and resources. We wanted to come up with simple...

With today's mobile money platforms, the value proposition for keeping money digital and driving up usage of digital payments is still thin. Mobile money is built on speed (real-time clearing) and liquidity (thousands of merchants where you can cash in and out). It's ready-cash (an immediately...

In India, the business case of the BC model is yet unclear. The main limiting factor is very low customer activity rates. Low usage is compounded by the prevalence of unduly low pricing models on the basic savings proposition, which is based on a perception that customers have low willingness to...

The Financial Sector Deepening Trust of Tanzania (FSDT) has conducted two censuses of cash outlets in Tanzania, in 2012 and again in 2014. The availability of places where one can exchange cash for transferable or storable electronic value is an essential component of financial access, and the...

Building a successful mobile money system requires a complex ecosystem of players handling a large volume of transactions. This paper identifies four principal paths to building mobile money ecosystems; makes the case that countries should adopt regulatory frameworks that allow for any or all of...

This paper reviews the growing literature that has spawned around branchless and mobile banking in developing countries over the last five years. Around 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to formal financial services, and yet 1 billion of them have a mobile phone. Branchless...

Cash imposes large costs on society, yet it is hard to envision moving to an entirely cashless society. If we cannot get rid of cash, then we need to change it in a way that makes it less costly for all to handle. We consider the possibility of creating a new kind of banknote that can be...