M-Pesa: Transforming Millions of Lives – I

Posted by Mohit Agrawal on 1/19/10 • Categorized as Telecom

The economic impact of mobile phones is a well talked

about fact but the role of mobile phones in remittances and money circulation can be
far greater. Despite the great potential, there are very few examples of successful
mobile money transfer due to regulatory hurdles and evolving business models. By far
the most successful example of mobile money is M-Pesa. M-Pesa is a joint venture
between Vodafone and Safaricom (the local mobile operator ) with the backing of
Citibank and Commercial Bank of Africa. This two part case study would attempt to
explain the reasons behind M-Pesa’s success (part I) and how it is transforming the
lives of Kenyans (part II).

The name M-Pesa is derived from the Swahili word pesa, meaning cash. M-PESA
allows users to make four basic types of transaction:

• transfers from person to person

• transfers from individuals to businesses
• cash withdrawals at designated outlets
• loan receipt or repayment

How does the service work?

The M-Pesa service platform, developed in-house by Vodafone and the consulting
company Sagentia, integrates a mobile wallet with Safaricom’s rating, billing and
provisioning systems.
Subscribers of Safaricom can register for the M-Pesa service by filling up a simple
form and providing any identification proof. Once registered, Safaricom replaces their
SIM with the M-Pesa enabled SIM (if required, all new mobile subscribers now get
the M-Pesa enabled SIM). To load the money on the the wallet, the user needs to visit
the nearest agent and deposit cash there in exchange for “e-Float”. This e-Float is like
currency that can be used to make payments or transfer to any other person. The e-
Float is can be transferred to any person or merchant via encrypted SMS. The receiver
of the virtual currency can either use it for further transactions or can cash-out from
M-Pesa designated outlets. The figure along side depicts the M-Pesa transaction flow.

How has the service performed so far?

Safaricom has regularly been releasing the financials of M-Pesa service which have
been impressive by any standard:

1. As on November, 2009, M-Pesa had 8.6 million users which is ~25% of

Kenya’s population
2. Close to 15K agents (more than doubled in last one year). Kenya has 1500
ATMs and 840 bank branches which pale in comparison
3. Monthly person to person transactions worth over $320 million with average
of $37 per user per month
The service is not only scoring high on financials but also on the consumer
confidence. Kenya’s independent Financial Sector Deepening Trust (FSD), which
aims to support the development of inclusive financial markets in Kenya, carried out a
survey of M-PESA use in 2008. The survey of 3,000 randomly selected households
across Kenya, 300 randomly selected M-PESA agents and 50 M-PESA head offices
found almost 40% of households use M-PESA, with 63% sending regular financial
support. Of those surveyed:

• 90% believe their money is safe with M-PESA

• 81% find M-PESA very easy to use and a further 15% say it is quite easy to
use
• 84% say losing M-PESA would have a large negative effect.

Factors behind M-Pesa’s succes

• Large Market Share -- Market share of Safaricom in Kenya was in excess of

80% at the time of launch of the service. This large base could ring in the
network effect which is reflected in the high consumer adoption.
• Trust - Safaricom selected the agents with a lot of care to ensure agents with
high integrity are there on its network. Since the service involves money, it is
important gain user trust. Safaricom communicated a lot with the users; if the
server is slow, it would communicate that to the users so that there is no
anxiety amongst the users. The survey conducted by FSD confirms the faith
reposed by users in the M-Pesa service.
• Relationship with the Regulator and other Banks -- Safaricom never had
any confrontation with the regulators. It involved the central bank right from
the very beginning. It always tries to accommodate concerns of the regulator
and the banking industry. The Kenyan Government had voiced concerns over
the possibility of criminals using the service to launder money, and on May
4th 2009 had ordered the Central Bank to audit Safaricom’s M-Pesa service.
Safaricom welcomed the Government’s decision and passed the audit due to
complete transparent operations and proactive sharing of data with the
regulator. The Central Bank declared the service safe and in line with
Government’s objectives of financial inclusion
• Quick response to consumer needs- Safaricom quickly changed its focus
from repayment of microloans to helping people make person-to-person (P2P)
remittance payments to their friends and family after it found the consumer
preference for P2P transfers in a survey at the beginning of the service.
Safaricom has been able to keep a tab on the pulse of the consumers and has
been nimble enough to adjust its value proposition to the needs of the
consumers.
• Simple Communication -- At the start of the service, the communication was
simple, “Send Money Home” targeting the migrant workers. The
communication’s focus on what the single largest service (rather than all that
M-Pesa) could do was a well articulated value proposition. The video below is
the commercial on “Send Money Home”

• Pricing- Safaricom kept the pricing of the product very transparent and lower
than other alternatives. Free registration and no monthly fee helped the agents
in persuading the potential user to subscribe to the service. This helped in
 building up the customer base initially that was important for agent and
merchant recruitment.
• Store Management -- Safaricom ensured consistent branding, training and
constant supervision of the stores to deliver the right user experience. It
worked tirelessly for proper liquidity management at the stores.
• Limited KYC -- M-Pesa was not positioned as a bank alternative and hence
the “Know Your Customer” requirements were quite relaxed. The users were
required to submit only the identity proof to get the service started. This
limited KYC helped many Kenyans especially in the rural areas where the
address proofs and other documents required by the banks are not available
with most of the Kenyans. People who were not able to fulfill the
documentation requirements of the bank saw M-Pesa a good alternative.
• Dedicated Customer Care Line - In Kenya, not everyone can read, so
sometimes people make mistakes and send money to the wrong person, so
Safaricom established back office support to assist people get the money back
where possible. M-PESA has its own dedicated call centre with its own
number. Safaricom ensures that a very high quality of customer care is
maintained. The strong back office support has helped the company in not
only building trust but also attracted the users who are afraid of technology.

Criticism of the service

Despite being touted as a financial inclusion service, M-Pesa user households are
twice more likely to have a bank account than non-user households. It is young, male,
urban migrants who are driving the uptake of services – customer adoption. Hence,
the adoption is not uniform across social strata.

Both agents and customers complain of cash float problems, especially in the rural
areas. Because the majority of transactions in the village are withdrawals, agents must
maintain their cash float. They do this by making frequent trips to the bank. This can
be problematic if the agent is not close to an urban centre, where most banks in Kenya
are located. This situation is frequent despite great efforts by Safaricom on the store
liquidity management.

The service availability is not uniform across the country. The

service availability is defendant on the network availability which is strong in the
south-west corner of the country (as seen in the picture alongside). There are only
2000 towers of Safaricom which are not sufficient to cover the entire country.

All in all, M-Pesa is a great service which is brining in big benefits to the company
and the users. In my next post, I am going to talk about the economic benefits that this
services has brought to the people of Kenya.
In the meantime, please leave a comment on your take on M-Pesa service and what
you think are the reasons for its success?

References:

1. Three keys to M-PESA’s success: Branding, channel management and pricing (by
Ignacio Mas and Amolo Ng’weno, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)

2. Safaricom website (http://www.safaricom.co.ke)

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Related Posts:

• Socio-Economic Benefits of Mobile Money Transfer

• Mobile Driving Online Traffic To Offline Stores
• Is the Telecom growth story over?
• Mobile Money Transfer (MMT)

Tagged as: M-Pesa, MMT, Mobile Payments

12 Comments

1.

Sachin Bhavsar

January 20, 2010 • 10:56 am

Hi

This is extremely valuable information, although most of the people would

like to see same success in the Indian Context.

Having said that M Pesa can be really successful model in India, comparing
the mammoth number of Subscribers, but it is really a dampener in terms of
Regulatory compliance and acceptance of common platform between banks
and telcos.

I would state and this is my personal views that, M Pesa was succesful since
government in the region was lenient in the regulatory norms or in other words
since Regulatory was not a constraint hence it was more successful.
 With 500 Million subscribers, there should be not be doubt of M Pesa getting
it own desi version soon.

Cheers

Sachin Bhavsar

Reply

2.

Robert Syputa

January 21, 2010 • 11:47 am

Business-Social networking is the engine (framework). eMoney and exchange

is the fuel that will propel a true ‘revolution’ that is far more dramatic than
anything yet seen – computing, mobile phones, Internet, displays, and other
contributing developments.

Reply

Robert Syputa

January 25, 2010 • 8:09 am

Sorry about teh truncation…

I put up an index page at:

http://www.agglom.com/set/78215/Business_Social_Capital_Networks
_A_True_Revolution

I haven’t found time to comment more fully yet.

This subject is important: both of itself and also how this conspires
with business-social networking enablers and markets. I can think of
several worthwhile businesses that can be created.. that are also
socially responsible.

Robert Syputa

Reply
3.

Gaurav

January 25, 2010 • 12:05 pm

Thanks for the information….Nice article Mohit… M- Com revolution in

India is yet to come. The current hurdles from regulator and platform between
the bankers and the operators is making the things not working. However we
have seen a significant growth interms of bill payments, recharges via M-
Commerce techniques specially Airtel i am talking about. We will see the
reform happening in this technology also very soon in India with regulator
relaxing some norms and bankers and operators on a same platform. ….

Reply

4.

prashantn

January 27, 2010 • 8:55 pm

A similar service exists in Pakistan. The telecom partner in NOR Telecom

company(UNINOR in India)
The advantage in Pakistan, is that the UID(Unique Identification Number) is
already live, and for a successful Mobile Transfer, the UID is a prerequisite.

This way the KYC is eliminated, at the same time, the transactions can be
traced through the UID numbers.

Reply

5.

Robert Gray III

January 31, 2010 • 10:56 am

I suggest you check out Beam – simple money service http://www.beam.co.in

launched in India focussed on the unbanked and recently got notimated to
GSMA Global Mobile Awards 2010. It’s already a hugely successful with
nearly 1 million subscribers.

Reply
 o

Ian Bastow

February 3, 2010 • 4:08 am

Thanks Mohit for your very interesting articles – also Robert for the
link to Beam. The convergence between mobile and SaaS will create
an amazing social, economic and computing revolution over the next
decade, and m-commerce is at the top of the list.

Reply

6.

Jaco

March 12, 2010 • 11:01 pm

good article

Reply

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Mobile Money Transfer (MMT)

Posted by Mohit Agrawal on 5/28/09 • Categorized as Services,Telecom

Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) is a peer to

peer form of mobile payment mechanism which has the best prospects for
success amongst other forms of mobile transactions. The GSM Association
has picked up MMT as a project and is supporting its members in embracing
MMT.
The money transfer has been in existence since the time the money was
invented by man. Man has moved from one place to another in search of work
and in many cases, leaving the family behind in his hometown. The families’
back home get support from the money the migrant population sends back
home. Forms of money transfer have changed over the years. The most
primitive method being either carrying the money themselves when they visit
back home or send it through a friend or acquaintance. For the last many
years, many people have been dependant on Postal Services to remit money
home. This service was popularly known as money order in many countries
including Great Britain. Postal services are known to have branches where
even the banks do not offer services. This envious position of postal
departments is being taken over by mobile services as their distribution
network starts to out number other traditional distribution networks. Today,
mobile operators have the largest distribution network in any developing
economy and hence are in a better position to remit money from one location
to another.
The World Bank estimates that remittances totaled $397 billion in 2008, of
which $305 billion went to developing countries, involving some 190 million
migrants or 3.0% of world population. The money received is an important
source of family (and national) income in many developing economies,
representing in some cases a very relevant percentage of the GDP of the
receiving countries. As per another World Bank estimates, the cost of money
transfer varies from 2.5% to 25% depending on the sending and receiving
country combination. This high cost of money transfer is forcing people to try
alternative ways of money transfer and telecom companies are more than
willing to oblige them. Given the size of the mobile industry, the subscriber
penetration and the technology, it is not surprising that mobile money transfer
has evolved in the cellular space. Major operators with international and inter-
regional footprints such as Vodafone and Orascom Telecom have announced
their intention to deploy mobile remittance, which they hope will act as a
catalyst for the wider adoption of mWallet-enabled transaction services. The
cost of money transfer over mobile is much lower than other available
mechanisms.
MMT started as peer to peer airtime transfer. Later, the people in the low
income group without credit cards started to barter airtime with products. In a
way, mobile airtime started to be used as a proxy for cash. The balance
transfer mechanism was introduced by the carriers using electronic recharge
method to reduce the distribution cost of low value recharges. When the
control of airtime transfer was given to consumers, airtime started to be
passed on and traded in exchange for goods or services. Kenya and
Philippines were the first few markets where P2P informal payment systems
have developed into more formal money transfer services.
Initially the airtime transfer was restricted to the same carrier but later on as
the demand increased, companies like Redknee (Roaming Recharge
Platform), eServeGlobal, etc. started to provide interoperability across
carriers. The money can be transferred using a SMS or using a platform
based on USSD or IVR. The process of mobile money transfer is detailed in
the figure below:
The key entities involved in the mobile money transfer are retailers and one or
more entities out of the rest of the four listed below:

1. Cash-in/ Cash-out retailers and

2. Banks, or
3. Mobile Carriers, or
4. Handset Vendors, or
5. 3rd Party Money transfer enablers

The business models depend a lot on the regulatory freedom given by the
central banks. There are essentially three prevalent business models in the
field of MMT.

1. Carrier – Bank Partnership Model, e.g. MTN and Standard Bank in

South Africa (MobileMoney service)
2. Carrier only Model, e.g. M-PESA of Safaricom in Kenya
3. 3rd Party – Bank Partnership Model, e.g. OboPay

The business models in mobile money transfer are very similar to mobile
payments. For further details on these models, please refer to my earlier post
on mobile payments business models
Critical Success Factors
The process of mobile money transfer may look very simple and intuitive but
there are many factors that could derail the evolution of this exciting money
transfer mechanism. A few of the critical success factors are listed below:

• Consumer Acceptance – For any service to be successful, the

consumer acceptance is a necessary precondition. Consumers are
 looking for easy to use, secured and cost efficient money transfer
service. Consumers especially in the developing country may not be
very comfortable with technology and may not have too much help at
hand. This means that the service should be intuitive and should use
an existing mechanism like SMS or IVR or USSD. USSD is better as it
is more secured than other two. Consumers value security!!! The cost
of transfer should be far lower than the other means of prevalent
money transfer mechanisms. The service providers should work
towards building trust amongst the consumers. It would make a lot of
sense if the most trusted brands in the business can come together to
offer mobile money transfer services.
• Building of Adequate Ecosystem –The ecosystem in MMT would
include the customer acquisition setup, distribution and retailer
network, technology provider and the banks. The service providers
should have enough outlets where the consumers can get the mobile
money loaded on their phone (cash-in) and can also exchange the
mobile money for cash (cash-out). Consumers are not going to travel
10 kilometers to avail the service. Treasury management, liquidity
management and customer transactions management are some of the
new skills that the service provider needs to learn unless there is a
bank that is involved in the ecosystem. Insufficient liquidity
management can kill the service
• Regulation – The future of mobile money transfer is dependant on the
regulatory environment in various countries. The central banks across
the world need to appreciate that the risk associated with mobile
money transfer is low and hence they should be ready to exempt some
of the regulations when it comes to MMT. “Appropriate” and
“Proportionate” regulatory environment should be the approach
followed by regulatory authorities. At the same time, the service
providers should fully comply with the rules and regulations laid out
with respect to KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti Money
Laundering), CFT ( Combating Financing of Terrorism), controlled risk
matrix, etc.
 • Service Provider Outlook – the carriers should not view this service
from the prism of their existing mobile services. Mobile money transfer
is not just another VAS service and is neither a service to control churn
and enhance retention. Churn reduction can be a by-product of this
service but cannot be the objective in itself. Adequate top management
focus should be there on this service otherwise, it may not take long
before the service provider goes bankrupt due to liquidity and treasury
mismanagement. There are new competencies that are required to be
added to provide this service and unless a carrier or any service
provider is willing to commit itself for the long haul, it is not worth
getting into this service. It is essential to conduct a proper risk
assessment before committing resources to this business.

Read more: http://www.telecomcircle.com/2009/05/mobile-money-transfer-

mmt/#ixzz13XXknGZp
What you don’t know about M-PESA
by Olga Morawczynski: Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Olga Morawczynski is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has

spent more than a year investigating customer adoption and usage in both urban
and rural Kenya. She is the author of a forthcoming CGAP brief on M-PESA and
recently co-authored Designing Mobile Money Services: Lessons from M-PESA
with Ignacio Mas.

The story of M-PESA that most of us know usually goes as follows. The two big
players, Vodafone and Safaricom, got together to develop and launch M-PESA. They
spent months testing, adjusting, and re-testing the system before it went live. The
result—an immensely popular service offering that has radically changed both the
financial and telecommunications sectors in developing countries and spawned a
lucrative industry for mobile money. This is not exactly how the story went, at least
not in the early days. Vodafone, led by a powerful duo of Nick Hughes and Susie
Lonie, was heavily involved from the beginning. While Nick was selling the service
idea to the executive staff at Vodafone, Susie was getting her hands dirty, so to speak,
and leading the pilot in Kenya.

Although Safaricom provided support throughout the pilot (access to desk space, a
small customer care and finance team, technical integration and support) they did not
dedicate a larger team to the project until commercial launch. This is not surprising.
The mobile network operator (MNO) was still focused on growing their customer
base. The introduction of a service that radically differed from their core service
offering was risky. Many also questioned whether M-PESA could beat out a form of
value transfer that was already in place—airtime.

So, if Safaricom was not heavily involved in the pilot then who was? There was also
a smaller player that had a vitally important role in the conceptualization and
development of the application. That is, Sagentia, a technology consultancy firm
based out of Cambridge. The firm not only wrote the software for M-PESA, they also
designed the business processes, and provided operational and technical support
during the pilot and after launch.

Recently, I was lucky to meet the initial development team of Sagentia (now they
have formed their own company called Iceni Mobile) at their offices just outside of
Cambridge. Several interesting findings came out of this discussion. Firstly, the firm
emphasized that a small and dedicated team is important, especially when two big
players are working together. M-PESA needed a significant amount of attention from
the beginning. The demand for such attention increased as M-PESA grew rapidly—
surpassing 2 million customers within their first year. Members of the team told
stories of being on-call 24/7, and resolving system issues in the middle of the night.
There is no doubt that it would have been difficult to get such attention from either of
the MNO giants. Usually, these companies lack the resources (human, time) that are
needed for the development of this type of system. This is especially the case if the
product has not yet gained the confidence of those at the very top.
Furthermore, the design of the application interface and entire system underwent
several iterations. It began as a tool for the repayment of MFI loans. It was launched
as a P2P transfer service. Such changes were made because the pilot team did their
research, and closely monitored usage patterns. Their findings in the field were then
fed back into the design of the application. The team explained that to react to these
changes, they focused on flexible design. This has paid off generously as M-PESA
moves across other contexts, which have very different needs and usage patterns.
I ended the discussion by asking the team what they planned to focus on next. How do
you, after all, beat a success like M-PESA? They assured me that M-PESA was just
the beginning. Using the mobile as a platform, they plan to create developmental
services that penetrate other spheres —m-health, agribusiness. They further predicted
that the mobile will soon begin to revolutionize these other spaces as well. This is a
very exciting proposition. If the mobile phone can penetrate and transform financial
sector, which is dominated by old and powerful players, imagine what it can do in
these other spaces.
Tomorrow's Phones Today: Extending Mobile
Applications into the Developing World
February 28, 2010 at 6:00pm

Do you remember when cellular phones were bulky, grayscale and used solely for
voice-based communication, less than a decade ago? Now fast forward ten years, and
cellular phones have radically transformed into miniature computer terminals; able to
access the Internet, download videos, transmit and store high quality pictures, and
serve as a repository for leisurely activities like games and cooking guides. Indeed,
we have witnessed a wide chasm form between mass-market phones and “smart
phones”, which offer much more interaction through graphical and video
interfaces. Although mass-market phones have been extremely useful tools in the
developing world, the latest hardware and software development trends have been
tailored for smart phones, which are mainly utilized in developed nations. In this
regard, the next decade of development efforts and infrastructural improvements in
the mobile world appear to be poised to correct this digital divide by providing smart
phones at low cost to developing countries.

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it at the recently-concluded Mobile Word Congress
in Barcelona:

"We understand that the new rule is mobile first… in everything. Mobile
first in terms of applications. Mobile first in terms of the way people use things. And it
means that we have a role now to inform, to educate through all these devices."1

Without a doubt, the most radical shift in the mobile industry enabling mass
marketing of smart phone applications has been the disaggregation of software
creation. The barriers to entry for new software solutions have been lowered
dramatically, exemplified by the launch of Apple’s Developer Kit and the open-
source Android platform. A shift from a previously oligopolistic industry structure to
a more competitive environment has taken place, where independent developers with
relatively little capital can leverage existing hardware platforms to produce their own
niche. Indeed, independent entrepreneurs in various parts of the world can readily
enhance the value of mobile hardware platforms by creating complementary
applications and systems suited to their local populations. Rather than seek to address
general consumer needs and the drive towards consolidation this brings, entrepreneurs
can instead carve out niches for themselves in addressing specific needs and demands,
ensuring product differentiation in a market where the barriers to entry are low and
will continue to get lower.

For example, mobile developers have recently deployed mobile banking systems in
Kenya and Malawi for populations that do not have access to bank branches. The
phone provider Safaricom lets users deposit, transfer and withdraw funds via simple
text messaging, bringing convenience to communities who lack the infrastructure and
know-how to access financial services and systems. The popularity of the M-PESA
system as a banking option has risen at an astonishing rate since its introduction in
2007; assistant professor Tavneet Suri at the MIT Sloan School of Management and
Georgetown University economist William Jack found that 38 percent of Kenyan
households have at least one M-PESA user in them2. In contrast, only 22 percent of
adults have bank accounts. According to Suri and Jack, groups as diverse as farmers
and children sending money back to their parents were utilizing M-PESA; a powerful
demonstration of how mobile technology can effect social and economic changes in
the developing world3.

Despite the favorable climate for deployment of mobile applications in the developing
world, several challenges still exist. First, smart phone innovations – which often do
not reach developing countries - make the headlines regularly, but they represent only
a small fraction of the mobile market. According to a research report by Gartner,
smart phones only comprise 12% of the mobile market, while the vast majority of
phones are still mass-market models4. The primary reason why smart phones have not
penetrated more of the world market (besides cost) is that the infrastructure required
to make full use of their capabilities (e.g., high-speed mobile Internet connections,
national-scale phone networks) are often non-existent or bare in the developing world.
As the UNCTAD Information Economy Report notes, the staggering increase in
mobile phone subscribers in the developing world has not been matched by
infrastructural development, leading to poor service quality and consumer
dissatisfaction5. In this regard, extending useful applications into the developing
world must be mediated through the pipeline of mass-market hardware. Yet the less
glamorous nature of the task should not hide its importance –simple applications can
go a long way in developing countries, as seen above in the case of mobile banking.

To address the fundamental challenge in the mobile phone divide, MIT is pursuing
new mobile telecommunications research programs for the developing world.
Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM) aims to foster
mobile phone-related research and entrepreneurship in developing countries to
address relevant social and political problems. In partnership with Nokia, this
program teaches computer science students from developing countries such as Kenya,
Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda the fundamentals of mobile application development,
hoping to provide them with the tools to develop mobile phone applications relevant
to local needs and cultures. EPROM also runs "SMS Boot Camps" at the University
of Nairobi, which couple education and entrepreneurship in an academic setting and
teaches teams of students to launch and market their own SMS services to the millions
of mobile phone users in Kenya. Thus by blending technological development and
entrepreneurial leanings, EPROM hopes to contribute to the development of the social
structure of the mobile market.

Moreover, MIT students and faculty have also contributed to advances in phone
software technology. In May 2008, four MIT undergraduates shared a $25,000 prize
as winners in Google's Android Developer Challenge with their project, Locale6.
Locale enables Android Users to efficiently manage settings on their mobile device.
At the MIT Media Lab, HealthMap's Outbreaks Near Me application is currently in
development, allowing users to track and inform others in the community about the
spread of infectious diseases. MIT’s NextLab class, with the tagline “Mobile
Innovation for Global Challenges”, guides students in partnership with Mexican
universities through the entire process of developing mobile phone software to tackle
social challenges, turning the whole classroom itself into a cutting-edge research lab
where ideas are generated and brought to market over the course of a semester.
At the cusp of the new decade, the mobile phone market has entered a period of
dynamic change, in which rapid innovations are reshaping and redefining the reach
and scope of both smart and mass-market phones. In this environment, potential
opportunities for entrepreneurs exist in both the hardware and software fields –
tomorrow’s phones are poised to be created by bold and decisive individuals today
who not only produce exciting tools and applications but also leverage improved
telecommunications infrastructures in order to reach under-served populations.

References

1. PC Magazine, 16 February 2010. ‘Google Focuses on Mobile First,’

Upcoming Applications at Mobile World
Congress”http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2010/02/google_focuses_on_mobile
_first.php. For the Mobile World Congress Website,
seehttp://www.mobileworldcongress.com/conference/event_highlights.htm
2. MIT News Office, 23 February 2010 “Banking on Mobile Money”
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/mobile-money-0223.html
3. William Jack and Tavneet Suri “Mobile Money: The Economics of M-PESA”
October 2009 http://www.mit.edu/~tavneet/M-PESA.pdf
4. Gartner Research Report "Market Share: Smart phones, Worldwide, 4Q08 and
2008"http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?
ref=g_search&id=908313&subref=simplesearch.
5. UNCTAD´s Information Economy Report 2009: Trends and Outlook in
Turbulent Times “Africa catches up in mobile phones but is falling behind in
broadband access” http://www.unctad.org/Templates/webflyer.asp?
docid=12273&intItemID=1528&lang=1#endnote1
6. MIT News Office, August 29 2008 “MIT class project gets a gold star from
Google” http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/android-prize-0829.html

About The Author

Jia-Chuan is passionate about helping people unlock their potential.

Hailing from Singapore, he has an S.M. in Political Science from MIT and a B.A.
with first class honors in government and history from the London School of
Economics. Jia-Chuan's past experiences include stints at the Ministries of Finance
and Foreign Affairs in Singapore where he carried out policy research in the fields of
organizational logistics and international relations.