Today the MMU team is releasing a guide to commercial best practice for mobile money services. Mobile money uses the mobile phone to access financial services such as payments, transfers, insurance, savings and credit. Mobile money is a sustainable, scalable approach to providing convenient and affordable financial services to the underserved. Quite often however, the first steps can be confusing and this guide aims to rectify this. The guide has been written primarily with wallet-based MNO-led services in mind; however, since it covers the main topics in mobile money services it is likely to have relevance to services led by banks or third parties also. It is hoped this guide will serve as a useful introduction and refresher to staff within mobile money services at all levels of maturity.
To begin with the paper describes what mobile money is, who the service is designed for and what products are available within a mobile money service. The guide then continues with a description of marketing for successful services moving from market analysis through to how ATL and BTL campaigns help move the customer along the journey to regular use. The next section describes the important aspects of a distribution network and how to recruit, incentivise and manage an agent network as the service grows in size.
Additional areas such as fraud and risk, regulation, technology and organisational structure are then introduced in order to give a rounded introduction to mobile moneys services. At each point, the Mobile Money 101 guide has a reference to the full library of MMU resources relevant to that topic.
Mobile Money 101 training will be given at the MMU Global Event in Nairobi on July 9th.