NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

In many developing countries it’s common for a person to have a mobile phone but not a bank account. In fact, more than 1 billion people fit this description, and the number is only likely to increase. To that end, many companies are considering how to give residents access to banking services via their handsets. The GSM Association predicts that by 2012, nearly 300 million of the previously “unbanked” will be using some form of mobile banking.

The Harvard Business School case study Mobile Banking for the Unbanked explores two very different examples of mobile financial service models: WIZZIT, a third-party startup that teamed with a major bank to provide standard banking services via mobile access to impoverished residents of South Africa; and M-PESA, an initiative launched by the mobile network operator Safaricom (in conjunction with Vodafone) to offer a new type of financial service to the poor residents of Kenya.