Mobile Money Exchange

Featured Topics

• Mobile Money Transfer
• mPayments
• Mobile Money for the Unbanked
• mBanking
• mTicketing
• mWallet
• Regulation
• Security
• Technology
• Vendors
• GSMA Mobile Money For the Unbanked

Featured Research

I do like to be beside the NFC side

Simon Rockman from the Mobile Money Exchange took a Samsung NFC phone for a tram ride. Or did the phone take him?

Methodology for Assessing Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Risks

Mobile money services improve access to formal financial services in developing countries. To date there has been no evidence of money laundering and terrorist financing, but concerns exist. Now is the right time to discuss how risks can be assessed

News Headlines

Vipera floats for £8.8m

A reverse takeover on the Alternative Investment Market in the UK has valued Mobile Money Technology company Vipera at £8.8m.

Vipera is primarily known for its mobile banking systems. It provides a flexible solution that enables full mobile access to any financial service. Its multi-channel mobility solutions for mobile banking and wallet functionality provide ready deployment of versatile mobile money transfer and mobile payment services.

Vipera has established technology that is already in use and for which there is the potential to expand into a sizeable business. Customers include Mashreq Bank (the largest private bank in the United Arab Emirates), Maybank Group (the largest financial services group in Malaysia), Ministry of Interior of Qatar, Qatar National Bank and Axiom Telecom.

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Record loss for Monitise

Monitise has reported growing losses from £13.13m last year to £17.04m.

Part of the Monitise business model is based on bounties from banks for signing up new customers and this will account for some part of the £6m revenue. New subscriptions are growing at 100,000 users a month. This will be in part thanks to the iPhone application. Transactional revenues grew from £500,000 last year to £2.9m this year. Licence revenues 1.7m and consultancy £1.4m.

A  deal in July saw Visa increasing its stake in Monitise to 14.4% which along with a share placing saw Monitise raise £32m.

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Square shipping again

Customers who have been waiting patiently for their Square card reader are getting their devices after a recent hiatus. A posting on the Square Blog by
Jack "twitter founder" Dorsey, had said that it was being held for business case rather than technical reasons. Something that will come as no surprise to anyone in the Mobile Money Business. 

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Tesco and Nokia develop Grocery App

Visa adds NFC to Blackberrys for Turkey.

US could adopt M-pesa

Key Insight

Can Pakistan’s flood victims find hope in mobile money?

By Maha Khan, GSMA Mobile Money for the Unbanked

Pakistan is facing an enormous humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of the country’s worst flooding. A crisis in terms of victims that is now larger than the last three devastating natural disasters combined (the Asian Tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir and 2010 Haiti earthquakes).  One fifth of the country has been affected by the disaster; 20 million people, almost equalling Australia’s entire population.  Given the speed that is necessary to cope with the huge number of people without safe drinking water, food, and shelter, I can’t help but think of the role mobile money could play in helping to accomplish the task that aid agencies face.

While mobile platforms have been used by aid agencies to distribute electronic vouchers redeemable for cash or food, such as the UN World Food Programme’s (WFP) pilot project for Iraqi refugees in Syria, mobile money is still relatively new in this field.  Aid agencies are, however, coming to realize the cost effectiveness, speed, and resilience that mobile money payments can provide in emergency situations.

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Don't be seduced by the magic of M-Pesa

by David Pringle

As mobile operator Vodacom prepares to launch the M-Pesa money transfer service in South Africa at the end of this month, it must be heartened by the latest usage data from its sister company Safaricom. Having launched M-Pesa in Kenya back in 2007, Safaricom said the service now has almost 12 million customers, up 60% year-on-year. These customers transferred 33 billion Kenyan shillings (410 million US dollars) in July alone, compared to 20 billion shillings a year earlier, according to Telecompaper.

But its continued rapid growth in Kenya doesn't mean M-Pesa is going to be a slam dunk success in South Africa.

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Getting the Agent Commission Model Right

So what’s the buzz about International airtime transfers?

The hidden cost of inactive users

Smart cards need smart phones