M-PESA: Mobile Money for the Unbanked Turning Cellphones into 24-Hour Tellers in Kenya
By N. Hughes, S. Lonie. Innovations Technology Governance Globalization, 2007
546 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Vodafone Group) launched M-PESA, an innovative payment service for the unbanked. “Pesa” is the Swahili word for cash; the “M” is for mobile. Within the first month Safaricom had registered over 20,000 M-PESA customers, well ahead of the targeted business plan. This rapid take-up is a clear sign that M-PESA fills a gap in the market. The product concept is very simple: an M-PESA customer can use his or her mobile phone to move money quickly, securely, and across great distances, directly to another mobile phone user. The customer does not need to have a bank account, but registers with Safaricom for an M-PESA account. Customers turn cash into e-money at Safaricom dealers, and then follow simple instructions on their phones to make payments through their M-PESA accounts; the system provides money transfers as banks do in the developed world. The account is very secure, PIN-protected, and supported with a 24/7 service provided by Safaricom and Vodafone Group. The project faced formidable financial, social, cultural, political, technological, and regulatory hurtles. A public-sector challenge grant helped subsidize the investment risk. To implement, Vodafone had to marry the incredibly divergent cultures of global telecommunications companies, banks, and microfinance institutions –and cope with their massive and often contradictory regulatory requirements. Finally, the project had to quickly train, support, and accommodate the needs of Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Information Systems, Media Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/547d42c666d7ab3a8078efe8e4bf9d18d2d3768d
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Citations in the corpus
- How Frugal Innovation Promotes Social Sustainability (2016, background): “It is a branchless banking service whereby the M-Pesa users can deposit and withdraw money from a network of agents like airtime resellers and retail outlets [171].”
- Blurring Livelihoods and Lives: The Social Uses of Mobile Phones and Socioeconomic Development (2009, unknown): “Molony, “‘I Don’t Trust the Phone; It Always Lies’: Trust and Information and Communication Technologies in Tanzanian Micro- and Small Enterprises,” Information Technologies and International Development 3(4) (2006).”
- Can Mobile Money Help Firms Mitigate the Problem of Access to Finance in Eastern sub-Saharan Africa? (2018, background): “The service was initially introduced in Kenya in early 2007 to help urban-migrant workers send money back home to their families who reside in rural areas (Hughes & Lonie, 2007).”
- The state of the art of innovation-driven business models in the financial services industry (2010, background): “The customers do not need to have a bank account, they just need to register with Safaricom for a M-pesa account [67].”
- Mobile Payments Go Viral: M-PESA in Kenya (2010, unknown): “For more detailed accounts of the M‐PESA service, see Hughes and Lonie (2009) for a historical account, Mas and Morawczynski (2009) for a fuller description of the service, and Mas and Ng'weno (2009) for the latest accomplishments of M‐PESA.”