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by samvher 2266 days ago
I think one important component to the success of M-Pesa is Safaricom's near-monopoly on the mobile telephony market. If you are not the only big player in the market it's going to be much harder to get your mobile money network running straight away because you have to think of support by other telcos and competition on pricing.

I spent some time in Kenya and M-Pesa is very practical, I used it regularly for small payments. One thing that I found a bit frustrating is the very high transaction costs - way higher than you would ever pay with regular banking. The (poor) users don't really have a choice though, so Safaricom is able to make massive profits.
1 comments
eitland 2266 days ago
Not completely similar but here in Norway we have a number of telephone companies but we still have a working mobile money solution (Vipps) since the banks actually managed to cooperate to create an (mostly) buttery smooth experience that doesn't seem to care a bit (as seen by the customer) about what phone, what plan, what provider or what bank you have.

Edit: IIRC - anyone who remembers exactly should feel free to update - it was a startup that created the first version, then I think it was bought by one of the major banks but now it seems to work completely decoupled.

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varjag 2266 days ago
Vipps was developed by DNB (the bank) from the start, and outcompeted all other banks' offerings. It didn't have much to do with telecoms at all.
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krisvage 2266 days ago
While Vipps works well today, compared to MPESA it was developed when the market had already matured and you could rely on every user owning a smartphone. Telenor and DNB actually tried to release something similar to MPESA years before, but since the application had to be installed on the SIM card you had to be both a DNB and Telenor customer [1].

Vipps is not decoupled today, but has been merged with the e-identity (BankID) and e-invoicing (eFaktura) to form a monopoly behemoth owned by most banks in Norway with DNB as the largest non-majority owner.

[1] Source in Norwegian: https://www.digi.no/artikler/telenor-og-dnb-gir-opp-valyou/3...

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