Microfinance Practice: Re: [MFP] Vodafone Aims to Replicate M-Pesa's Success in India

Thank you Anuj, this is indeed interesting. I was under the impression that the main constraint to the adoption of mobile money in India was the RBI. Does this Vodaphone initiative suggest that this is no longer the case, or that it never was, or is the Indian Mpesa perhaps a different animal, without the mobile wallet feature ?

Malcolm

----- Original Message -----

From: Anuj Jain

To: MicrofinancePractice@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 3:35 PM

Subject: [MFP] Vodafone Aims to Replicate M-Pesa's Success in India

Interesting development..

In Kenya, and in other parts of East Africa where mobile money services have become available, a number of Banks, MFIs and SACCOs are now beginning to use mobile platform to expand their BoP segments. It will be interesting to watch how this pans out for MF sector in India.

Vodafone Aims to Replicate M-Pesa's Success in India

M-Pesa, the mobile-based money transfer and payment service that has been highly successful in Kenya since its launch in 2007, is now available in India by Vodafone, working through its fully-owned subsidiary Mobile Commerce Solutions Ltd (MCSL), and ICICI bank, the country's largest private sector bank.

"To begin with, we have launched [M-Pesa] in the states of West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand," says Suresh Sethi, business head for M-Pesa at Vodafone India. "A significant part of the population [of these states] migrates in search of livelihood and is still underbanked or unbanked. Our idea is to study their usage pattern, look at how customers adopt [M-Pesa], make it a success here, and then launch the service pan-India."

http://www.cgdev.org/blog/new-findings-seasonal-foreign-agricultural-workers-create-american-jobs?utm_&&&

anuj

Anuj K. Jain

Sr. Coady Fellow| Microfinance and Development| COADY International Institute

St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, B2G 2W5

"You can't solve the problems created by current pattern of thought using current pattern of thought."