I spotted a column by Dave Birch in the Guardian from last week (when it looks like Emily posted it on Textually as well) that’s pretty interesting about how mobile phones are being used to facilitate payments in African countries.
It’s nothing advanced as Simpay or PayPal for mobiles or anything like that — it’s using prepay credits as currency. We’ve seen operators that allow P2P airtime credit trading, which has spawned micro-resellers in places like the Philippines, but this sounds a little different. It’s a grassroots use of prepaid credits, which carry enough value to people that they’re accepted for payments — and even as bribes by government officials.
It works by people buying scratch-off vouchers, then texting the voucher number to the payee, who then applies it to their account. The only drawback is that while somebody could pass the number on to pay somebody else, they can’t split up the credit. Yet, anyway — it seems like if the operators there are smart, they’ll do like the Filipinos and make their systems open to this kind of thing, and reap the benefits.
The mobile operator MTN in South Africa have just launched an ambitious plan together with Standard Bank to give all their several million subscribers a free bank account linked to their phones. The system allows instant transfer of money between phones, purchses, withdrawals/deposits at ATMs, etc. The same system (developed by Fundamo) is already being used by operators in six other countries. MTN intends to roll it out across all their other African networks next year (they are the second largest operator on the continent. See the story at http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0826/p07s01-woaf.html
The mobile operator MTN in South Africa have just launched an ambitious plan together with Standard Bank to give all their several million subscribers a free bank account linked to their phones. The system allows instant transfer of money between phones, purchses, withdrawals/deposits at ATMs, etc. The same system (developed by Fundamo) is already being used by operators in six other countries. MTN intends to roll it out across all their other African networks next year (they are the second largest operator on the continent. See the story at http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0826/p07s01-woaf.html