We’ve been watching the impact of the mobile phone in developing countries for a while and now Influx Insights points us to a mobile banking system found in Kenya.. Kenya has one of the fastest rates of mobile adoption anywhere in the world, with 8 million of its 35 million citizens now owning a phone.
Now the M-Pesa service offers Kenyans the ability to send and receive money using SMS messages. The site says:
M-PESA is a new Safaricom service allowing you to transfer money using a mobile phone. Kenya is the first country in the world to use this service, which is offered in partnership between Safaricom and Vodafone. M-PESA is available to all members of the public, even if you do not have a bank account or a bankcard.
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[chuckle] Am I the only one who remembers that this scheme was how PayPal started, before the eBay connection? It was a scheme to let people wire money betweens PDAs using infrared – and got its genesis when one of the founders was frustrated by settling a shared cheque in a restaurant using actual cash. Plus ca change ….
March 27th, 2007 at 6:14 am