Tavess research published a report about mobile money and claims that India will have 100 million mobile money subscribers by 2015. High mobile penetration and limited banking facilities are encouraging rural users to adopt mobile money and mobile banking services offered by mobile operators. According to the research, there will be 1 billion mobile money users across middle east asia, africa and asia.
National Payment corporation of India (NPCI) launched an interbank mobile payment service through which users can conduct transactions through their mobile phone. So far, over 10 million users have registered for this service – a very lukewarm response according to tavess considering a 790 million mobile phone user base.
The mobile money service mchek links your credit card or debit card with your mobile phone and allows you to transact via mobile phone. This service has seen the maximum uptake so far with over 2 million subscribers. mChek is closely followed by NG Pay which has around 1 million subscribers.
[advt]Despite the success of mobile money service in emerging markets, its adoption is still not widespread due to various challenges pertaining to lack of a well developed regulatory framework for mobile payments, maintenance of cash floats by agents residing in rural and semi rural areas (who are required to make regular trips to far away banks for maintaining cash floats), lack of technical know-how among users, and mandate by a few mobile payment services for subscribers to have bank accounts – making mobile money a challenging proposition for the unbanked rural population.
The key focus area for mobile operators targeting the mobile money market includes service customization to cater to the local population and localization of the go-to market strategies.. In addition, right pricing of the mobile banking service to provide affordable services to the subscribers while not compromising on the agent’s commission involved, is key to making the service attractive for both the subscribers and the agents. [source]
Be the first to comment