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

Friday, July 11, 2014

Airtime can be used as an incentive to drive the uptake and usage of mobile money services in countries where its growth has been sluggish.

This is according to Rajiv Bhatia, Ericsson head of mobile commerce sales EMEA, who explains that operators and financial institutions can replicate the loyalty programme of credit card providers, through the use of airtime to encourage consumers to use mobile money.

He notes that there is an untapped opportunity to drive activity and loyalty in mobile money using mobile prepaid airtime. Airtime can be used to incentivise usage in several ways such as encouraging people to have a minimum amount of money in their wallets and rewarding them with better data and airtime bundles for usage of their mobile money wallets.

Rajiv states that Africa is a leading market for mobile money and that millions of people without access to banking services were signing up to use mobile money services.

Operators and financial institutions are battling to trigger activity in dormant wallets, he says. Rajiv explains that the slow growth of mobile money in SA was a result of the expansive ATM and bank infrastructure available, and how this network had done much to address the needs of the population to access and remit cash.