Mobile Money Services: Design and Development for Financial Inclusion

This paper analyzes a wide range of mobile money deployments from across emerging markets in order to understand which characteristics are critical for the success of a mobile money service. It particularly focuses on how these mobile deployments were developed, structured, and implemented, and how these factors impacted the success of the deployments. The paper is based on existing primary research and it develops a preliminary framework to help prospective mobile money operators with the design and development of a mobile money system from scratch. The framework highlights the key decisions mobile money operators must make and the perspectives of the researchers on which paths are likely to lead to the highest chances of success. The paper covers the following sections in detail:

• Structure of a typical mobile money service targeted at financial inclusion in emerging markets;
• Competencies that mobile money operators must develop in order to be successful;
• Key decisions mobile money operators must make in attempting to build these competencies and the major alternatives that they have for each decision;
• Case studies of successful and challenged implementations spread over a range of emerging markets across distinct geographies.