September 13, 2012
Ali Ndiwalana is Research Lead for Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money Incubator and Lee-Anne Pitcaithly is Program Director for Grameen Foundation’s Mobile Financial Services Accelerator initiative. Both are based in our Uganda office. This blog post originally appeared on the CGAP Technology Blog. We've included an excerpt here with a link to the full post below.
Mobile money has had bad press lately for fraud-related cases. Most of the reported cases were either the result of internal employees misusing the system to cause operator losses or fraudsters trying to scam unsuspecting users. There is another angle that rarely gets any press—when users or agents abuse the platform and use it in rogue ways that it was never intended.
Across East Africa, most mobile money transactions are primarily between registered users. Registered users get free cash-in (convert cash into mobile money, steps 1), pay fees to make transfers to other registered users (step 2) and registered recipients pay fees to cash-out (convert mobile money into cash, step 3). Most transactions are single loop (from sender to receiver and then converted into cash) and the operator automatically deducts and shares fees with agents as summarized in the standard scenario.
Agents are critical for success of any mobile money platform, but they may also offer its weakest link. Let us consider a few examples. Agents may charge additional fees to customers, they may bypass the platform for withdrawals, they may perform over the counter transfers for customers to other agents if they have ability for P2P amongst agents or they may split transactions to take advantage of the pricing model. I am sure others can easily add to this list.
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A recent report predicts active users of mobile money services in emerging markets to show a 36 percent annual growth rate, resulting in an