Mobile Money Savings Systems: What Do Users Think?

Grameen Foundation's Lisa Kienzle, Olga Morawczynski and Ali Ndiwalana recently co-authored a blog post with Ignacio Mas on the blog Mobile Active. Here they  introduce and user-test one concept of savings: deferred payments over mobile money. Below is an excerpt, followed by a link to the full post.

Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money believes that mobile money is essentially a liquidity-management platform. Put differently, it could be described as LiFi: Connecting people to an electronic payment system via their mobile phones that provides Liquidity with Fidelity. What does it take to turn mobile money systems into a full-fledged savings platform? A full savings proposition would address these additional key elements:

• Mechanisms to help people link their savings vehicles to particular savings purposes or spending goals
• Incentives and discipline mechanisms to help customers set money aside into their savings vehicle(s), or “discipline in"
• Incentive and discipline mechanisms to help people keep money in their savings vehicle(s) once it is saved, or “discipline out.”

The challenge is how to optimize the mobile money environment by adding these sorts of features without making mobile money so complex and unwieldy that it is difficult or impossible to manage on simple mobile phones.

Read the full post on the MobileActive blog >>