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.
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