Why developing countries embrace mobile banking
"More than half of the world's adults — 2.5 billion — are unbanked, according to research recently published by the World Bank Development Research Group. The American government, however, estimates that the U.S. is home to only 10 million of them, which means the vast majority of the unbanked live outside the country. And many of them reside in developing areas, such as India, where more than 40 percent of residents are unbanked, and Africa, where that number is at a staggering 80 percent.
Instead of trying to coax these populations into getting on board with mainstream banking, many companies are finding new ways to provide them with financial services, whether it's deploying kiosks to help the unbanked cash checks, pay bills and transfer money, or offering mobile banking services that allow consumers to transfer money via smartphones.
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Consumers can load their MOM m-wallets with cash at one of 82,000 retail touch points (expected to be 2 million by year's end) and use it to pay for electricity, gas and mobile bills and top-ups, as well as airline, bus and movie tickets.
MOM launched for the B2B market in India in 2010, and is now providing the semi-closed m-wallet for the consumer market. The service has 500,000 subscribers and does a business volume of INR 20 million ($358,422) daily." via Self Service World
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