In October, the GSMA Mobile for Development Utilities team led a full schedule of events in Cape Town, hosting the first grantee workshop for all 21 new grantees of the M4D Utilities Innovation Fund*, an Africa Working Group, and a lively session on Partnerships, as part of the GSMA’s second Mobile 360 Africa event.

The two-day Africa Working Group agenda included a range of topics to generate discussion on the opportunities and barriers of the mobile-enabled utilities sector. Here, we draw out some of the main highlights from our sessions:

Partnerships

1. The value of mutually beneficial partnerships between MNOs and service providers is being proven across the energy and water sectors. Lessons from Phase 1 of our Innovation Fund have been wide-ranging and will be published in our upcoming case studies. For example, Fenix International have demonstrated that an association with an MNO, particularly in the form of co-branding and marketing, can help sales because of increased consumer trust. Fenix sold over double its projection of ReadyPay Solar units in 2014, also benefiting MTN who reaped the rewards of over 100,000 additional mobile money transactions in one year.

2. Although some partnerships have flourished, service providers are two to three years ahead of where most MNOs are in the Utilities field; a testament to the forward-looking innovative start-ups that are leading the way. MNOs are beginning to see the light and many now have the ambition to play a much more active role within the off-grid space. Yet they still need to assess and measure the business opportunity before entering into partnerships or leading the service themselves.

3. Boundaries between sectors are beginning to blur; as these silos continue to be broken down innovations will thrive and new partnerships and business opportunities will emerge.

M2M technology

4. M2M technology is an enabler for scalability and has huge potential for the Utilities sector, with 14 out of 21 Phase 2 grantees using M2M and working at the forefront of innovation…

5. …Yet many barriers need to be confronted, including the high costs involved in employing M2M applications and the connectivity challenges in remote locations. The GSMA’s Connected Living programme is tackling these areas by focusing on Embedded SIM Specification and Low Power Wide Area technologies, in order to drive down costs and accelerate standardisation to help players in the ecosystem embrace the Internet of Things.

6. M2M is only ‘scratching the surface of what we can do today.’ With the proliferation of data coming in, we will be able to do interesting things around customer insights with M2M technology. For example, customers who have never had access to electricity often can’t predict their own consumption. M2M can resolve this issue by providing insight into consumption patterns enabling incremental installation of generation capacity.

Mobile Money

7. The harmonisation of APIs is key to driving growth: currently the process for service providers to integrate with mobile money platforms is taking around three months, compared to PayPal integration which can be completed within an hour. The GSMA’s Mobile Money team is talking with operators to drive the development of harmonised APIs.

8. The high cost of transactions for micro payments is a major barrier for service providers, particularly in the sanitation space where toilet access often costs below the minimum transaction threshold for mobile money. There is a need for new pricing models to support this tier of payments that are low value and high frequency, in order to drive mobile money adoption for these services. This can in turn contribute to customer retention while supporting entrepreneur productivity.

User-centric design

9. Although mobile-enabled utilities services are at the forefront of innovation it is important to remember the users who will ultimately use these services. The session led by Frog Design highlighted the importance of designing around the user. The customer journey exercise was eye-opening and highlighted some of the challenges users may face, which if left undetected and unresolved could result in failure of a service, no matter how innovative the product.

As part of the Working Group our stakeholders also attended the 2015 Mobile Money Global Event; highlights can be accessed here.

If you’re interested in attending the M4D Utilities 2016 Africa and/or Asia Working Groups, keep an eye out on our events page or email us: [email protected]

*Stay tuned for the announcement of our latest round of grantees