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

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

M-Pesa, the mobile-based money transfer and payment service that has been highly successful in Kenya since its launch in 2007, is now available in India by Vodafone, working through its fully-owned subsidiary Mobile Commerce Solutions Ltd (MCSL), and ICICI bank, the country’s largest private sector bank.

“To begin with, we have launched [M-Pesa] in the states of West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand,” says Suresh Sethi, business head for M-Pesa at Vodafone India. “A significant part of the population [of these states] migrates in search of livelihood and is still underbanked or unbanked. Our idea is to study their usage pattern, look at how customers adopt [M-Pesa], make it a success here, and then launch the service pan-India.”