It used to be that mobile money was synonymous with domestic p2p transfers – the “killer app” that propelled Safaricom’s M-PESA to such extraordinary success. It was clear that Safaricom had tapped a rich vein of latent demand for a safe and affordable way to remit money in-country, and this kicked off a rush to bring such services to market all over the world.

Yet a number of mobile money platforms that mainly offer P2P transfers have struggled to attract users over the course of the last year. Of course, it’s difficult to isolate why this has happened-mobile money is a complex business, and lots of things can go wrong. But one possible explanation is that Kenya, with its tightly knit families and its high degree of labour mobility, is atypical in the volume of remittances that flow within its borders.

We are starting to see some evidence for this. As part of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded project called AudienceScapes, Intermedia has recently undertaken nationally representative surveys to measure media use, ICT use and personal communication habits in Kenya and Ghana. They found that 42% of respondents in Kenya had used a money transfer service in the last year, versus just 14% in Ghana. Some of this discrepancy might be explained by the fact that M-PESA has allowed people who previously didn’t use what they would consider a formal money transfer service do so in the past year, but given the rate of penetration of M-PESA in Kenya, this effect cannot explain the entire difference. It is likely, rather, than there is simply more demand for money transfer in Kenya than Ghana.

So what does this mean? First, that operators who offer mobile money services need to be rigorous when assessing the demand for mobile money services in their market. There is no substitute for qualitative and quantitative market research-relying on anecdotal evidence, or drawing inferences from other markets, is fraught with risk. The GSMA has developed a toolkit to help operators assess the demand for mobile money services in their markets, and they can contact [email protected] to access it.

Second-and this is good news-operators have begun to explore more seriously other services that users might value on the mobile money platform. One example is bill payment. Telenor Pakistan enjoyed tremendous success bringing to market bill-payment services before offering P2P transfers. Nadeem Hussain, CEO and President of Tameer Bank (which is 51% owned by Telenor Pakistan), told a group at Consult Hyperion’s Digital Money Forum in London last week that easypaisa is on track to be processing bills by the millions by the end of the year. This is in part because for consumers in Pakistan, paying bills is a big pain point, just as sending money home was for consumers in Kenya. The option to pay a bill at a local agent is often preferred, by a wide margin, to doing so at the bank or other existing bill payment outlets: for example, Hussain reported that 40% of bills processed by easypaisa are paid outside normal business hours, which is impossible at traditional bill-payment outlets like banks.

The lesson of easypaisa (and Grameenphone’s BillPay and True Money) is not that mobile bill payment is the ‘next big thing’; rather, it’s that successful mobile money platforms are the ones that tailor their service offerings to their local market. This requires an extensive effort to understand customer needs; it also requires assessing which of the host of financial services that could potentially be offered on a mobile money platform (in addition to bill payment, operators are experimenting with international remittances, disbursements and repayments of microloans, microsavings, microcredit, insurance, and more) can be offered as part of a sustainable business model-which in turn requires a thorough understanding of substitutes that already exist in a given market.

If 2009 was the year of the proliferation of mobile money services beyond P2P transfers, we hope that 2010 will be the year that many more operators are able to align their services offerings with the needs of the low-income consumers they serve-setting the stage for more M-PESA-scale success stories in the months ahead.