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State of play of mobile money on the African continent: An interview with Greg Reeve
Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems,
11
(3),
197-202
(2017)
Abstract
‘Mobile money’ is a generic term for the ability to deliver various financial services to customers via mobile device. More than half a billion mobile money accounts were registered as of the end of 2016, with more than 170 million active accounts around the globe. People can use a mobile money account to receive their salary payment, purchase their electricity and water, buy groceries, transfer money to people they owe, pay their bills, move money to a savings account, and if required, access the money as cash. There is good progress across Africa, led by Safaricom with M-Pesa who, in their financial year 2016–2017 results, reported 19 million active subscribers, with ten transactions per customer per month. The most critical point to recognise is that each market is different. Mobile money has for the most part been an initiative led by the mobile phone operators. Recently however, banks are providing similar looking services. In this interview, Greg Reeve, Founding Partner of Mobile Finance Experts (MFX), discusses the development of mobile money on the African continent.
Keywords: mobile money; Africa; M-Pesa; Safaricom; mobile money transitions; mobile operators; banks; MFX
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Diederik Bruggink is Managing Director of Bruggink Consultancy and is an independent international expert in cards, payments, and market infrastructures. During his career, he has led and worked on several international and high-visibility projects, mainly with a focus on cashless payments, across the whole payments value chain, from (e-commerce) merchant acquisition through to issuing banks and within card switching and card processing organisations. He was one of the key authors of the first three editions of the ‘World Payments Report’, and he makes regular appearances on conferences in the cards and payments industry. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems.
Greg Reeve is Founding Partner of MFX — Mobile Finance Experts LLP and was previously the Head of Mobile Payments for Vodafone, being responsible for M-Pesa from 2009 to 2013, and later General Manager for Millicom Mobile Financial Services. He has served on the board of Bima (the world’s largest micro-insurer), Rswitch (the national switch of Rwanda), and currently provides non-executive director and C-level advisory services to Belcash in Ethiopia.
