Today, thanks to M-PEAS, it is more convenient to pay for a taxi service in Nairobi than London/New York as ore than seventeen million Kenya are connected through this money system and it consequently adds to a quarter of the country’s GNP. First learning: there need to be a clear gap as well as an objective to fill that gap. ‘The success of the technology lies in necessity, according to Seems Ideas, director of the Mobile Money for the Unbaked (MUM) programmer’ (Graham, 2010).
Helping money move around especially in a developing nation where there is not easy access to banks is extremely important and hence the system stands to benefit – customers: non-banked rural citizens mainly, businessmen; suppliers; distributors and so on. The system solves the problem of risk of carrying cash in emerging markets. Second learning: Understanding popular external trends. Technology revolutions have made mobile phones central to financial transactions and one example of a brilliant innovation is MFC.
Near field communication (MFC) is changing the way people pay for their shopping in Japan and South Korea and its contactable payment technology is said to be the next big thing. This shows Safari’s precision in capitalizing on an opportunity that allows it to est. new technology for a social cause. Third Learning: How to bring about the change? There was a very clear advertising campaign for M PEAS ? ‘send money home’.
MESA served as a safe money transfer mechanism during the ethnic and political disputes in 2008 and the ‘trust in its functioning helped develops its initial base of customers. The campaign was centered around make it as easy and comfortable as possible for the people to bond with this alien system in terms of zero payment for account set up, no detailed form filing and verification checks. The approach was a ‘no barrier’ approach and this helped in transforming the money transfer system into a vehicle for loans and savings.
Fourth learning: Cost – benefit – Awareness about the benefit: In order to make people even more comfortable spreading awareness about the fact that most people felt that there was an increase in their income by 5- 30% due to use of MESA. Fifth learning: When there are no legacy obstacles: Emerging markets have the potential to lead the tech space like how Kenya adopted the technology faster than other countries as there is no barrier due to legacy technology.
