A couple of very good m-banking review articles
Thursday, May 8th, 2008For those interested in mobile banking, here are a couple of recent articles I’ve found particularly helpful:
1) Gautam Ivatury and Ignacio Mas at CGAP have released yet another insightful focus note, this one on “the Early Experience With Branchless Banking“ (related blog post here). In part of the note, they integrate data from Brazil, Russia, and South Africa suggesting that (at this time) branchless banking customers use the payments and transfers features, more than the savings features. To me, this starts to peel back the layers on both the behavioral and the “mental models” questions, where data has been notably scarce. These early findings suggest that users may initially understand the services as virtual post offices, rather than virtual wallets. However we are still early in the domestication/structuration process - meaning, there is plenty of time for the social norms and use patterns to emerge in a different direction.
2) (via Jan Chipchase’s blog). Bill Maurer at UC Irvine has a draft concept paper, Retail Electronic Payments Systems for Value Transfers in the Developing World. Maurer presents a broad overview of the transfer functions of the m-banking space, and differentiates between emerging narratives (stories) that various interested communities apply to make sense of it. (Note again my interest in the mental models of m-banking). Depending on where one stands, the emerging story of m-transfers is one of empowerment, market share, new sources for fees, or the arrival of new strain of ‘tulips’.
I’m just finishing up a broad revision to this conference paper, and am grateful to have these two papers to draw on and reference. I’ll post or link to the revision when it is ready.