We have wrapped up the second and final day of panels and interactive discussions at the MMU Kuala Lumpur working group where one the key themes was how to successfully market mobile money. We also discussed bill payments, international remittances and e-money. Here are some of the highlights from today’s proceedings.
Bill Payments: We kicked off the day with a panel discussing the nature of this opportunity with representatives from three of our grantees: Arif Abdul Qayuum, Director of Financial Services for Telenor (Pakistan); Piyachart Ratanaprasartporn, General Manager of True Money (Thailand); and Delwar Hossain Azad, Head of Financial Services at Grameenphone (Bangladesh). The panellists shared some of their learnings in successfully launching bill pay services in their home countries and highlighted the importance of a simple proposition to customers, while also stressing how lengthy & complex agreements with billers can be.
E-Money, What it Means for Mobile Providers: Andrew Zerzan, MMU Regulatory Projects Director covered some of the new research on e-money. He highlighted how it actually works within the mobile money context and the reasons why it is so popular amongst MNOs. His presentation also covered areas of regulation which can help MNOs improve regulatory engagement focusing on issues such as: funds protection, financial system stability and crime prevention.
Marketing Sessions: Neil Davidson, Manager of MMU kicked off this segment by explaining how effective marketing is the key to persuading potential users to become regular users. These sessions were structured around learnings from a successful mobile money deployment such as M-PESA, as well as insights from participants during breakout sessions where they discussed their own experiences and shared their own best practices. The final session focused on case studies and the results of MMU’s recent efforts with operators to mine their customer databases, conduct market research, and use the resulting insights to improve their operations and increase the efficacy of their marketing efforts.
Furthermore, we interviewed Waceke Mbugua, M-PESA’s Marketing Manager at Safaricom (Kenya) and discussed the formidable challenge in effectively marketing mobile money services. She gave us a synopsis of how M-PESA was marketed in Kenya from its origins and how their marketing strategy has evolved over time to meet the needs of the business and its customers. She highlighted how M-PESA is still seen as a stickiness product and not a major driver of direct revenues and shared with us some interesting statistics including that 70% of M-PESA’s customers say they save as much as 3 hours, and up to 3 USD per transaction rather than other money transfer methods. Other highlights included the importance of customer education in keeping pins safe to reduce the incidence of fraud.
International Remittances: Given the dramatic rise in the number of mobile money deployments across the globe, mobile remittances are becoming an increasingly important element of mobile operator strategies. During this Q&A session moderated by Neil Daly from the GSMA, Andy Chong from Axiata and Matthew Talbot from Sybase 365 discussed their remittance model and investigated the benefits of a multilateral hub approach while analyzing the role of international remittances within Axiata’s mobile money strategy as well as the nature of the partnership between these two parties.
Finally, we ended the day with a very successful Bar-Camp style session, where the MMU team “crowd sourced” topics from participants, and working-group members were able to share their insights on issues such as: User experience as an impact to increasing active usage, purpose built savings products or applications, and effective agent structures to drive growth, amongst others.
We are already looking forward to the exchange of more learnings over the next couple of months and will follow up in the next few of days with the rest of our work on profitability, as well as some videos and presentations from the main event.