Mobile Money Summit: Customer Usage Patterns and Adoption Curves for Bank-Led Deployments

Next on the list was Len Pienaar, CEO of Mobile and Transact Solutions. He presented the situation in South Africa and the adoption of mobile banking services in the country.

Here’s what we’ve learned from his presentation:

• Mobile banking in South Africa has taken off and keeps growing like crazy.
• Customers could top-up airtime, pay utilities, data and SMS bundles.
• They also ventured in the payment space. On the slide, we’ve seen a number of online retailers that are using the platform.
• Moreover, they also tried cross selling financial products with mixed success. Opening of savings accounts and micro loans proved successful, while transactional products were not.
• They managed to replicate the model in 5 other countries in Africa.
• Demographics wise, mobile banking is mostly used by younger users, aged between 19 and 40 years.
• Len concluded with some research data, saying that people trust the service, but have concerns on WAP login-related issues, availability and reliability of the service.

That’s it from Len. Next comes Carol from Obopay…

[Image from Flickr]