Mobile money slowly turning East Africa into cashless society
13 février 2012
The East African |February 11, 2012
Mr Ndiwalana has a wealth of knowledge on this topic. He is currently leading research at Grameen Foundation in Uganda, a global non-profit organisation that works to replicate the work of Bangladeshi Grameen Bank, about what else can be done over the mobile money platform beyond their commonplace uses: money transfers, paying utility bills, and salaries in some rare cases...
“In a credit card system, you would have to install hardware and the technology that supports it. But mobile phones are hardware in themselves and can easily be used at points of sale,” he said.
South Africa has already begun experimenting this. In December, Absa bank and MasterCard inserted a chip on phone handsets of the bank’s staff to enable them pay for goods at coffee shops and canteens. The trial went well.
According to Benjamin Lyon, the Vice President Business Development at the Nairobi-based Kopo Kopo Mobile Financial Services, “In order to make mobile payments the new norm at the point of sale, consumers need an incentive to pay via mobile money and merchants need an incentive to accept mobile money.”
Kopo Kopo is focused on enabling merchants accept, process, and analyse mobile payments in real-time. The firm is working on how one can use his or her mobile phone at points of sale.