MMU Working Group Updates Mobile Money Deployments and Progress
1. The Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) Working Group – Programme Update Mobile Money Summit 2010, Rio de Janeiro
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3. Our Role: MMU is the main knowledge hub for how operators can successfully deploy mobile money Identify mobile money deployments (active or planned) by engaging with operators, vendors and other industry players Understand strengths and challenges , in order to identify how MMU can support and increase the success of the deployment Conduct research into how to overcome the challenges; Develop case studies on existing deployments to understand what has worked / not worked Build a body of knowledge and share research and case studies widely across the industry so that the wider industry can learn from them and increase the success of their own deployments Identify Deployments Review Research Learn Disseminate
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6. MMU Progress - MMU has built a strong portfolio of projects from which we can learn Cameroon Uganda Kenya Tanzania Bangladesh Cambodia Philippines Indonesia Fiji India Sri Lanka Pakistan Afghanistan West Africa Brazil Thailand East Africa MMU Working Group: MMU Fund Portfolio Overview
Welcome to the MMU Working Group. We have over xx of you with us today for the working group, and then the doors open tomorrow to the main event where we’re expecting close to 500 people to attend what will be the GSMA’s 3 rd Mobile Money Summit. So it’s the first time we’re doing it in Latin America .. And we’re very pleased to be here in Brazil. It seemed only fitting that the country which will be hosting the Olympics and the World Cup should also be hosting our Mobile Money Summit, to complete a hat trick of major international events. We’re glad that so many of you could join us in Rio de Janeiro, despite ash clouds, British Airways strikes, and visa office red tape that many of you had to get through to be here. So thanks for coming.
Most of you will be familiar with our goal by now – to provide mobile money services to 20m unbanked consumers by 2012. To stimulate deployments in countries where MM doesn’t already exist, to extend the reach of mobile money, particularly to low income consumers, and to increase the range of financial services offered via mobile, beyond payments.
And how were we going to do that? By working very closely with the industry. We are constantly learning about new deployments, and seeking to understand what works and what doesn’t work within each model in each market. We identify best practice and we do research into key areas where we see operators facing common challenges. We act as a knowledge hub to feed this best practice and research back to the industry, through various means of communication, whether it is our blog, our field visits, our annual report, and also via event such as this one.
So we’ve seen a lot of progress broadly across the industry since we launched our programme at the start of last year. Hopefully you’ve seen our deployment tracker, from which these screenshots are taken. Each red dot marks a country where there is at least one mobile money deployment – 65 live deployments today. Africa is clearly in the lead as the continent with the largest # of deployments. There are fewer live deployments in LatAm, but we know of a number of planned deployments in those markets. And from these deployments, there is a lot that we can learn. So today’s agenda is rich with sessions where you’ll hear what some of these learnings have been. MMU has visited a number of deployments, and we’ve seen several things that operators have done well and some things that we’ve seen be significantly less successful, and Paul is going to present some of these findings today. A selection of technology vendors who have implemented mobile money platforms around the world, will be sharing with us their insights. And the Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation, who are sponsors of our programme, will share with us their perspectives on what it takes to deploy mobile money successfully.
Making MM mainstream was one of MMU’s objectives … whats happening with the other two? In terms of scale, there are now a number of operators who have over 1m customers registered for mobile money. These are impressive numbers, and opeators have worked hard to get customers signed up. But registering customers doesn’t make operators any money –customers have to be actively using the service to create revenues. High rates of registration must be coupled with high rates of activation, and this is one of the challenges that we’re seeing the industry face right now. Our panel today on Customer Activation, we will hear from Oi, MTN Uganda and SMART on what their strategies are to drive customer activation. And we’re seeing an increase in range of services – M-Kesho. Many of the operators in our portfolio are doing this, Oi, Zap, Telenor, Safaricom, etc. Panel on beyond P2P. Important to get the Value proposition right – how customers use their phones, what their financial services needs are, in order to design a service that customers will use and will be successful. Customer insights presentations.
Of these 150+ deployments, MMU is working very closely with 20 of them as our grantees. Our grant from the Gates Foundation included a 5m USD fund, to provide sub-grants to operators, in order to run innovative mobile money projects from which the rest of the industry could learn. We are announcing this week who these operators are, and what we are looking to learn from them. Neil Davidson, who manages the grantee portfolio, will present later today on the latest set of grantees to join the portfolio.