April 20, 2012
Ali Ndiwalana is Research Lead for Grameen Foundation's AppLab Money Incubator. Below is an excerpt from our AppLab blog, followed by a link to the full post.
Agents are critical for the success of a mobile money (MM) ecosystem; they provide an avenue for cash-in (converting cash into “e-value”) and cash-out transactions. Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money team has been to many rural villages in our quest to better understand the needs of users, and have often encountered mobile money users, but no agents in the vicinity. When users told us they made regular transactions, we asked how they managed to do this. In many cases, it was via unofficial agents or “last-mile agents,” as we refer to them. So we started looking out for last-mile agents.
We did not have to wait long. Our next research assignment took us to Luweero, to interview individual users and learn more about their financial flows and sources of income. As luck would have it, we encountered two registered mobile money users who were also operating as last-mile agents – providing mobile money services to people in their village as a side business.
The first individual – for privacy’s sake, let’s call him John – was serving a community of unregistered users by sending and receiving money using his mobile money account. The bulk of his customers were villagers receiving money sent by relatives working far away. Because his customers dealt in low-value transactions, he made a profit by aggregating multiple small transactions into one large transaction, while charging for each separately. For example, if three villagers received money via his MM account and he had no cash on hand to clear them, he would aggregate all their money and just make one single withdrawal from his MM account.
Read the full blog post at the AppLab Blog.