Today MMU is releasing a study, conducted by the consultancy InterMedia, which explores the opportunity in payments and financial services in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  The rationale to commission a study in the DRC was largely to facilitate access to consumer insights in a market where data and information is a challenge to collate.  While the findings of the study are aimed to help enable operators in the DRC to adapt their service offering to meet the needs of the customers, these insights certainly apply to a broader audience as our findings underline critical success factors in mobile money.   The bottom line is that to succeed in mobile money, operators need to create and position a high-quality service that meets their customers’ needs better than any existing alternative.

Before delving into the findings, here is some further context to this study.  Due to the challenges of conducting a nationally representative study in the DRC, we focused on four key regions: Kinshasa, Bas-Congo, Katanga and North Kivu. Each of these regions is commercially interesting due to relatively high population density and economic activity.  In a young market like the DRC, these regions may well be the source of scale of mobile money.  The survey focused on household decision-makers and small businesses and therefore these findings should not be considered representative of the DRC.  Rather these findings are meant to be illustrative of these economic hubs in order to provide insight on the opportunity for the early stages of mobile money in the DRC.

The reality is that in the DRC mobile money will play a significant role to increasing financial inclusion.  While only 4% of the adult population has access to an account at a formal financial institution [1], we found that most of our respondents – household and small business alike – predominantly operate in cash. With approximately 13 million unique mobile subscribers in the DRC, [2] mobile money can be the mechanism to not only increase access of financial services but also resolve the security risks of operating in cash. However, how operators position the product to meet customer needs may determine how quickly adoption occurs – and P2P may not be the initial trigger.

While domestic remittance was the most common financial transaction among respondents with more than half (53%) of the household decision-makers in our target regions having sent money in the last 90 days, “send money” is an unlikely trigger to drive customer adoption in the short-term. As much of a paradox as that this seems, customers had few obvious pain points in sending and receiving money.  70% of household decision-makers who had sent money had done so via a local transfer service or Western Union.  Moreover, most considered end-to-end transaction time as “short” or “very short” compared with other daily activities.  In this regard, the DRC is unlike a Kenya or a Zimbabwe where the local remittance options prior to mobile money were restricted mostly to informal buses, hawala networks or where remittance companies charge steep rates.

Operators in the DRC, much like operators in any market, will need to find the right trigger for adoption.  In our research we explored opportunities in other types of payments for both households and small businesses.  Both segments hold commercial potential and operators may be able to drive adoption more efficiently through focusing on a value proposition beyond P2P.

Beyond considering the value proposition and market entry strategy, this survey also examines customer perceptions of financial services, the opportunities of MNOs entering mobile money and ultimately includes recommendations and considerations for operators as they develop their mobile money services.  To ensure this data can be used for any interested stakeholder, all raw data, including focus group transcripts, will be available via MDI.  Our aim is to provide transparent non-biased data that supports operators and stakeholders in creating strategies to trigger customer adoption as quickly as possible.

Download the full report here.