Last week, MMU was in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. Around 100 participants from various organisations and regions attended the MMU Working Group. For those who couldn’t attend, MMU is happy to share some of the highlights from the Working Group.
Seema Desai, MMU Director, opened the Working Group by highlighted that there are more than 100 mobile money deployments around the world today; the prevalence of mobile money services is evidence that the industry is awake to the commercial opportunities that mobile money can offer. However, activating customers is still the industry’s number one challenge, according to a short survey which was sent to over a hundred deployment managers earlier this year.
Simone di Castri, who recently joined MMU as the MMU Regulatory Director, introduced himself to the Working Group and invited deployments to share their regulatory challenges with him, so that he can refine MMU’s regulatory strategy and work plan. He announced the launch of a MMU Regulatory Working Group, and he also announced that the next Regulatory Leadership Forum will take place at the GSMA’s NFC and Mobile Money Summit in Milan in October.
Claire Pénicaud, MMU Coordinator, and Neil Davidson, MMU Manager, presented the results of the 2011 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey. Based on data from 52 mobile money deployments, this survey has quantified for the first time the degree of adoption of mobile money services by customers around the world. In particular, the survey revealed that there were at least 60 million registered customers around the world and that 11 services had more than 1 million customers as of June 2011. A report presenting a more detailed analysis of the results from the survey will be released in April.
This presentation was followed by an interview with Albert Kinuma, Head of MTN MobileMoney in Rwanda. The adoption survey identified MTN MobileMoney in Rwanda as one of the fastest growing services in the world, so we wanted to learn more about what had made the service successful.
In a session entitled “Mobile Money: The View from the C-Suite”, Yasmina McCarty, MMU manager invited Maarten Boute, CEO of Digicel Haiti and Isaac Nsekero, CMO of MTN Uganda to share their perspectives. MTN MobileMoney in Uganda was launched in March 2009 and is now a very successful service with over 2.5 million customers. One of the key lessons learnt by Isaac was that it is necessary to “leave money on the table”: mobile money requires large investments in order to succeed and he cited that one of MTN Uganda’s mistakes was not investing enough in the early stages of the deployment. For Maarten, getting the organisation design right has been the main challenge.
Finally, Paul Leishman and Neil Davidson, both MMU Managers, presented some of the insights from their recent work on interoperability, which was published in February. In particular, they explained that even without interconnection in place, customers have ways that they can transact across networks: they can create accounts with multiple mobile money services, they can make an off-net transfer, and/or they can make an over-the-counter transfer. In a hypothetically interconnected world, mobile operators would connect their mobile wallet platforms and make possible a new type of transfer: a cross-net transfer. But it is not obvious that there would be a large segment of customers interested in cross-net transfers.
Mobile operators have assets that are valuable in payments. In the second part of this session, Yessie D. Yosetya, Senior General Manager, m-Finance, Strategic Business and Innovation at XL Indonesia, and Dave Parrat, Head of Business Development at Oltio in South Africa operators from Indonesia and South Africa shared their strategies for generating payment revenue by providing access to STK/USSD, and by authenticating and authorizing payment card transactions.
In the coming weeks, we will be posting the videos related to the event.