Most mobiles…

For 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.

Over the years, I’ve been keeping an eye on the research literature about mobile use in the developing world.   I first presented a version of this review at a conference in Hong Kong in 2005.  Now, thanks to Leopoldina Fortunati’s efforts to pull together a special issue of The Information Society, the review has finally been published.  Thanks also to the editors at the Information Society, and to the reviewers who provided such valuable feedback at various stages.

There’s a lot more of the literature to cover than there was when I started this back in 2005.  And, since it is an interdisciplinary review, I’m sure to have missed some citations.  Nevertheless, it has been a great exercise for me to get a sense of what’s out there, and to become familiar with the diverse work of an amazing set of researchers along the way.

I hope some of you find this review a useful input to your own work. 

Thanks everyone! 

Donner, Jonathan. (2008). Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature.  The Information Society 24(3), 140-159.

Abstract
This paper reviews roughly 200 recent studies of mobile (cellular) phone use in the developing world, and identifies major concentrations of research. It categorizes studies along two dimensions. One dimension distinguishes studies of the determinants of mobile adoption from those that assess the impacts of mobile use, and from those focused on the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users. A secondary dimension identifies a subset of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research.