Are You Thinking Wider than Technology when Thinking about Mobile Money?

Lee-Anne Pitcaithly is Program Director for Grameen Foundation’s Mobile Financial Services Accelerator initiative, based in the organization’s AppLab Uganda offices. Lee-Anne’s key role is to demonstrate that there is a full business case for delivering tailored financial products to the poor via mobile money channels. We have included an excerpt of her post from our AppLab blog with a link to the full blog post below.

Over the last few months, I have spent a lot of hours meeting with different financial services organisations discussing their planned mobile money integrations. In every instance, the financial institution was primarily addressing the integration only as a technology project. Thinking this way can set you up to fail as a business – and, more importantly, to fail your customers. Here are some other areas that you need to address when thinking about integrating with a mobile money operator.

Customer Service.  How do you service the customer – and deal with disputes – when their only engagement with your institution is through a third-party agent? If your driving reason for integration with mobile money is to extend your reach, then your branch network cannot fulfill the role of servicing customers. Do you have a call centre that can help? Do you have the ability to trace all transactions back to the point and time of sale? What query-based solutions do you have with the mobile money provider to get your customers the answers they in the timeframe required?

Continue reading this post on our AppLab blog >>