21. Mobile Banking in Africa: The Current State of Play

Fast growing economies with limited formal banking services experience greater financial exclusion and transaction curtailment, but mobile technology offers fast cheap money transfers and facilitates transactions. African appetite for mobile banking developed along the explosion in mobile phone technology. Mobile phone companies stood up to the challenge, but had to address peculiar geographies of remoteness and inaccessibility. Strategies of financial inclusion were developed by the sophisticated financial system in South Africa, which affected the unbanked’s demand for mobile money services. M-Pesa is the most successful and fastest growing mobile money service product. It has already delivered numerous innovations in mobile money products and services. Regulatory rigidity affected the take-up of mobile money services in some African markets, but overall mobile communication networks introduced innovative products to extend mobile banking into remote rural locations. The rapidly expanding mobile money service market stimulates entrepreneurial activity, creates employment and serves as a major contributor to state revenue where liberal market economic policies permit.