Branchless Banking Headlines & Highlights: Updates from Africa and Beyond

Summer is now officially over here in Washington and the busy fall season is off to a quick start. If you are just getting back into high gear, maybe this is a good time for us to recap some of the things we’ve been discussing on the blog over the last couple months, some of the latest news that’s caught our attention, and some things to keep your eye on in the coming weeks.

The South African bank FNB has recently launched its latest mobile banking offering Pay2Cell which allows FNB account holders to make payments to other FNB clients using only the recipient’s mobile phone number. This is a different product offering from FNB’s eWallet which allows FNB account holders to send money to anybody with a mobile phone. The recipient does not need a bank account and can withdraw the cash at any FNB ATM.

South Africa is one of the 7 markets that we covered in our recently released branchless banking country notes. The other countries include India, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil, Ghana, and WAEMU in West Africa. The report for WAEMU is now also available in French – la version en français UEMOA.

An active branchless banking provider in West Africa, Orange has recently launched the Orange African Social Venture Prize. This initiative aims to reward innovative projects using ICT for social and economic development in Africa. In this contest, 3 winners will be selected and will receive financial grants along with 6-months of mentoring support from management and ICT experts. The project should target at least one country where Orange has a footprint and the prizes will be announced during the AfricaCom Awards in Cape Town in November. The deadline for applications is the end of September. Read more about it here.

Staying in West Africa, Nigeria continues to buzz with branchless banking activity. The Central Bank of Nigeria recently issued operating licenses to 11 mobile money firms. As this article explains:

Some observers are optimistic that mobile payment services will bring financial [services] to many of the 70 million people who are mobile subscribers in Nigeria, a country where 28 million have bank accounts. Mobile money operators in Nigeria are reportedly preparing to roll out innovative services to address the approximately 67 percent of the Nigerian adult population who have never been banked and to increase financial inclusion to the unserved communities that have been shut out by the formal banking sector.

By the way, Mobile Money Africa does a great job of tracking the latest developments in the use of mobile technology for financial inclusion in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent.

Moving to East Africa, Microfinance Focus profiles Musoni, the first exclusively mobile microfinance institution, that has recently won this year’s Global Microfinance Achievement Award for the Most Innovative Use of Technology.

Moving to North Africa, Francesc Prior Sanz, Professor of Banking and Finance at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya and Fouad Abdelmoumni, former Director General of Al Amana and former member of CGAP’s Executive Committee recently wrote a paper on mobile financial services in Morocco: “Partnerships in Mobile Financial Services – The Case of Morroco.”

Another report that you may have seen (but worth mentioning again just in case) was a study that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched in 2010 with Bankable Frontier Associates to understand the demand for domestic payment services in the Philippines, and to identify potential opportunities and unmet needs for mobile money providers to target. GSMA’s MMU blog posted a comprehensive summary of this report earlier this summer from Salah Goss and Clara Veniard at the foundation. As they write,

Even though mobile money providers have been in the market for over ten years, they have struggled to gain market share in the face of well known and well established payment providers. Knowledge and usage of mobile money services are low with less than 4% of users of all payment service providers reporting usage of mobile money services…

You can access the full report on BFA’s website.

Moving to news from another island country, albeit much smaller than the Philippines, Vodafone MPAiSA Fiji has launched its international remittance service which allows MPAiSA Fiji users to receive money from Australia and New Zealand, in partnership with Lotus Foreign Exchange.

On CGAP’s Microfinance Blog, there is a series just starting on the role public funders should play in branchless banking. This coincides with the release of a CGAP Focus Note on this topic, “Emerging Lessons of Public Funders in Branchless Banking.” Follow the series over the coming weeks.

Back on the CGAP Technology Blog, we’ll have some upcoming posts on product innovation and the branchless banking business case for banks. This last topic complements the MNO business case series we ran on our blog a few months ago.

I’m sure I’ve missed many exciting developments from around the world. So post the latest news from wherever you are as a comment here, or better yet on CGAP’s Mobile Banking and Microfinance Group on LinkedIn. The content on this group continues to be almost entirely member-driven and is a one stop shop for global updates on branchless banking.

- Sarah Rotman