Mobile for Development Blog

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QR code merchant payments: A growth opportunity for mobile money providers

QR codes are an increasingly ubiquitous payment channel around the world Globally, digital payments are expected to reach an annual transaction value of USD 4.4 trillion in 2020, with 17 per cent CAGR through 2024. With growth rates like this, it is not surprising that ...

Unlocking mobile money interoperability and merchant payments across Africa through Mowali

Orange Group and MTN Group – two of Africa’s largest mobile operators and mobile money providers – have today announced a joint venture, Mowali, to enable interoperable payments across the African continent. The GSMA is proud to support its development. With over 338 ...

Decoding QR Codes: Are they useful for merchant payments in emerging markets?

QR codes are increasingly being adopted by merchants Recently, QR codes—or Quick Response codes—have been adopted by a growing number of players to facilitate retail payments.[1] There are broadly two ways[2] in which QR codes can be used for payments. In the first case, a ...

Merchant payments: Why it’s important and how to scale it for mobile money

This blog was co-written by Anant Nautiyal and Francesco Pasti. Merchant payments have not scaled in mobile money, but the opportunity is huge With transaction values exceeding $325 million per month in 2015[1], merchant payments is a prominent use case for mobile money. ...

Driving mobile money usage for merchant payments through awareness and engagement

This blog post is the second of a series on scaling mobile money merchant payments. Read the first post in the series. With approximately twelve million transactions per month and more than US$ 325 million transacted, merchant payments represent 1.9% of total mobile money ...

Merchant Payments: Choosing the right pricing model

Thursday 14 January, 2016 | Blog | Building the financial ecosystem | Global | Mobile Money

This blog post was co-written by Arunjay Katakam and Ben Lyon, a board member of Kopo Kopo. The opportunity of merchant payments in mobile money makes them impossible to ignore. Enabling consumers to pay for goods and services with mobile money increases the utility of a ...

Opportunities and challenges in merchant payments: Digicel Pacific, Airtel Africa & Greenwich Consulting

Thursday 10 January, 2013 | Blog | Global | Mobile Money

As of October 2012, 26 mobile money services had launched the merchant payments product, whereby a customer can use their mobile money eWallet to pay a retailer for goods or services on the spot.

Can mobile money work for merchant payments?

Monday 22 October, 2012 | Blog | Building the financial ecosystem | Mobile Money

With P2P, bill pay and airtime top ups representing the vast majority of mobile money transactions today, mobile money service providers are keen to broaden their product offering.

A regulatory model assessment of Payments Banks in India: The story of a glass half full, yet half empty

India’s Payments Banks (PBs) regulatory model has garnered a lot of global attention, partly because of its expected potential to tackle financial exclusion. It has also served as an example for countries such as Nigeria, which has developed a similar regulatory model for ...

Learning by seeing and doing: How our field trip to Indonesia is stretching our thinking on all things payments

Earlier this year, we published a paper exploring the potential pathways for evolving the mobile money business model. With internet and smartphone penetration in emerging markets at an all-time high, the paper seeks to clearly articulate how mobile money providers can adapt ...

How can mobile money providers leverage online marketplaces to embrace the ‘payments as a platform’ approach?

The mobile money industry is on the cusp of a fundamental change. Having successfully offered and scaled payments (with 272 deployments, 866 million registered customers globally, and processing over $1.3 billion dollars a day), mobile money providers are now in a position ...

Mobile money transaction fees and utility bill payments in emerging markets

According to the GSMA 2017 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money, Sub-Saharan Africa alone has 135 live mobile money services processing $19.9 billion transactions in value per year. The growth and increased sophistication of mobile money ecosystems across the globe ...

India’s new payments banks require a new business model for digital financial inclusion

This blog post was co-written by Lara Gidvani and Francesco Pasti The first of India’s payments banks began its operations last month – 15 months after the in-principle licenses were awarded by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The payments banks arrive not a moment too ...

Gates Foundation Issues Mobile Payments Challenge: An interview with David Lubinski

Friday 31 October, 2014 | Blog | Global | Mobile Money

Last month, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued a challenge to enable universal acceptance of payments, as part of its Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) initiative. The Gates Foundation seeks “new solutions that promote the use of mobile phone-based payments by ...

New publication on setting up shop: Strategies for building effective merchant payment networks

Today, we’re releasing the second publication in a series of deeper insights into selected topics based on the findings of MMU’s 2013 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Financial Services. This publication, ‘Setting up shop: Strategies for building effective merchant ...

The State of Mobile Money Ecosystem – How does building an ecosystem impact profitability and help create an efficient and affordable way to facilitate payments on a large scale?

In an article published last month, we discussed what people use mobile money for and which products were most popular. Today, I will try to answer the following question: How does building an ecosystem impact profitability and help create an efficient and affordable way to ...

The use of Barcodes in Mobile Payments: Scanning the Possibilities

Thursday 16 January, 2014 | Blog | Building the financial ecosystem | Global | Mobile Money

Barcodes have been around for decades. Popular across a wide range of sectors, they facilitate use-cases ranging from automated check-out at retailers, to patient identification in healthcare, to tracking of parcels. Smartphones are enabling an even greater range of ...

NFC mobile payments: A Case for Developing Markets

Thursday 28 June, 2012 | Blog | Global | Mobile Money

The following is a guest blog post by Annie Smith, who heads Mobile Financial Services in the Pacific Region for Digicel. As readers of this blog, we can appreciate the position mobile money has in a GSM business.

Sharing the pain, sharing the cash merchants

Monday 20 December, 2010 | Blog | Global | Mobile Money

The following is a guest post we’re pleased to share by Mireya Almazan, Associate Program Officer and Ignacio Mas, Deputy Director from the FSP program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Central Bank Digital Currencies: Initial policy considerations

Money is changing form, and how we make payments is also changing. The use of cash is slowly falling in most countries, according to recent research by the IMF. The rapid innovation in the payments space has accelerated the demand for digital money. Though licensed ...

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