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Modi’s surprise announcement wiped out 86% of the nation’s currency overnight, leaving the vendors at Panjim’s fish market to suffer heavy losses. “Nobody has cash, so they’re not buying fish.”
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From January, Goa’s government has announced that the city will go “cashless”, meaning every street vendor, rickshaw driver and shopkeeper must offer their customers the option to pay using a debit card or mobile phone.
Is it possible to imagine Goans buying fish without cash? Well, yes. Look at Kenya, where there are now more than 33 million mobile money users and 174,000 mobile agent locations. The most recent figures from the Central Bank of Kenya (CBA) show an astonishing trend. From February 2013 until September 2016, the number of monthly M-PESA transactions almost tripled, going from 53 million to 131 million, while the number of card transactions fell from 34 million down to 18 million. Yes, you heard that correctly. While mobile money using was tripling, card use was halving. I am told by reliable sources that one of the key reasons for this, apart from M-PESA being accepted at some 150,000 retail outlets now in a country with only around 10,000 cards terminals, is that when it came time to re-issue EMV cards for Kenyan bank customers, the customers had to go their local branch, with identification, and stand in line to get their new card. Many of them just didn’t bother, especially since they had already started to use mobile money instead of cards.
Central Bank of Kenya statistics show a decline in the use of credit and debit cards, despite the number of Kenyans holding them rising.
From Which payment system is best for when you are drunk? M-PESA! | Consult Hyperion
Anyway, the point is that an astonishing 96% of Kenya household now have at least one M-PESA users. That means, to all intents and purposes, that mobile money is an alternative to cash. That’s not to say that the cards guys are taking it laying down. They can read the papers just as well as I can, and so they have begun to look at alternatives to the dip, tap or swipe at point of sale and are investigating more mobile-centric alternatives.
Visa, has entered into partnership with Ecobank, to roll out “mVisa,” an innovative mobile payment service in 33 African markets by year-end. Mvisa enables consumers to pay for goods and services for their everyday expenses from groceries to taxi services by simply scanning a QR code on a smart phone or entering a merchant identification number into their feature phones
From Mobile Money Africa
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These figures are fascinating and they show just how effective a mobile solution can be. Hence my thinking that it may have been better for India to have waiting until the more flexible regulatory had begun bear fruit before. I’m going to blog in more detail about the Indian experiment as more data comes in,
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