Mobile money would transform even more lives in poor countries if regulators got out of the way. Mobile-money services are especially useful in developing countries. A worker in the city can send money to his family in the village without having to waste a day travelling on a rickety bus. Indeed, he can pay his family’s household bills directly from his phone. It is safer too: nobody wants to carry wads of currency on public transport.
Mobile money also gives its users—many of whom are poor and have no access to banks—a way to save small amounts of money. Mobile transactions are more traceable than cash, making it harder for corrupt officials to embezzle undetected. And lately Kenya has discovered a further benefit: the success of M-PESA has provided the foundation for a group of start-ups in Nairobi that are building new products and services on top of it
However Kenya’s success has yet to be replicated much elsewhere. More than half of all the world’s mobile-money transactions are handled by Safaricom. Mobile money is popular in one or two chaotic countries, such as Sudan and Somalia, but barely used in most places where it could do immense good, including India and China.
Not all countries need mobile money, of course. Rich countries, with cash machines, credit cards and internet banking, have little use for it.
In Kenya the government took the enlightened approach of allowing M-PESA to go ahead, rather than tying Safaricom in red tape. Many of the poor countries that would most benefit from mobile money seem intent on keeping its suppliers out—mainly by insisting they should be regulated like banks. This is often a mixture of laziness and turf protection: if the president’s cousin owns the country’s main bank, he may not rush to let cheap mobile-money systems into his country.
Read more here
