Financial Sector Development in Africa: Opportunities ... - World Bank

CHAPTER 2
Mobile Financial Services in Africa:
The Next Generation
David Porteous
In 2002, under the headline “Africa Is at Telecom Forefront,” the Wall
Street Journal called attention to the launch in Zambia of a platform
allowing payments via mobile phones (WSJ Online). The service was
offered by Celpay, a specialized payment provider linked, at that time, to
the mobile network operator (MNO) Celtel (later Zain). Eight years after
this early start, one of the world’s most successful and widely discussed
mobile payment services is to be found in Kenya: the M-PESA money
transfer service, launched in 2007 by MNO Safaricom. In June 2010,
M-PESA reported more than 10 million registered customers, who collectively
transferred US$400 million that month alone (Safaricom 2010).
The 2009 nationwide FinAccess survey found that close to half of all
Kenyan adults had already become users of the service (FinAccess 2009,
16). Celpay, for its part, remained active in Zambia in 2010, but with a
different business model, targeting business-to-business payments rather
than the consumer transfer market. 1
I acknowledge with thanks the research assistance of Matt Herbert in compiling data used in
this chapter during an internship funded by The World Bank. Also very helpful were the comments
of my colleague Johann Bezuidenhoudt, who has been personally involved in some
of the second-generation rollouts described, as well as those of anonymous reviewers at
The World Bank.
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