At the beginning there were Kenya and Tanzania \u2013 I\u2019ve visited them both last December and I can tell you local stores typically look like this one [photo source]. Afghanistan, India, South Africa, Mozambique and Egypt followed. Romania\u2019s next. The first European market.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t look too flattering of an entourage for Romania, indeed. Yet, if we follow the figures, there\u2019s a lot of business logic in choosing Romania as the first European market to test a mobile-phone\u00a0based money transfer\u00a0service that doesn\u2019t require a bank account. Less than 50% of its citizens have an active bank account \u2013 this makes Romania more like India, with 35% citizens with a bank account, or Tanzania, with less than 20%, than like Poland (70%), Hungary (83%), or the European Union as an average (93%) [source in Romanian]. Meanwhile though, if we\u2019re talking about mobile phones\u2026 well,130% of the Romanians have one, statistics say [source in Romanian].<\/p>\n
It\u2019s uncharacteristic for Vodafone to launch a new service with no loud, reverberating communication campaign, but that\u2019s what the telecom giant did withM-Pesa in Romania. It\u2019s a sign Vodafone went on with a small \u2013 and riskless \u2013 steps for a strategy. (I expect medium sized and small towns, as well as rural areas to be of strategic importance in promoting the service).<\/p>\n
The new service is operated by a separate company, Vodafone Romania M \u2013 Payments SRL, established for this purpose last year \u2013 that\u2019s because the whole thing basically works as a bank, so Vodafone needed special autorization from the central bank, as the Romanian law requires.[source in Romanian]<\/p>\n
Does the brand name of the service sound kind of weird? Well, you\u2019re right \u2013 that\u2019s because it\u2019s inspired by an unfamiliar,Swahiliword [pesa = money]. M-Pesa \u2013 M-Money, translated in English \u2013 is a triumph in countries like Kenya and Tanzania. Why is that? I wrote about the roots of the service\u2019s success on this blog last summer [here in Romanian]\u00a0\u2013 I also anticipated, then, that Romania would be a great testing market.<\/p>\n
I can testify there are countries in Africa where you can starve to death with a fat credit card in your pocket. You definitely need cash if you want to move around \u2013 or, much better, you need access to a service like M-Pesa. The reasons are so obvious: few ATM machines, the danger of carrying cash and so on.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a video from Kenya relevant for the product\u2019s target and positioning:<\/p>\n
Fairly well documented articles about Vodafone\u2019s quiet launch in Romania you can read in the international media: \u00a0PCWorld,\u00a0Gigaom,\u00a0Reuters\u00a0or\u2026\u00a0Sydney Morning Herald.<\/p>\n
The author of the Sydney Morning Herald\u2019s article has a worth quoting opinion indeed: \u201cThe fact that Kibera residents, and now Romanian farmers, can use this futuristic form of money is making me jealous. Technology developed for the \u201cfinancial inclusion\u201d of the poor could change the rich world for the better\u201c.<\/p>\n
As a conclusion, I\u2019d say M-Pesa in Romania is a logical, interesting and bold experiment groomed by a Vodafone business unit led by the same person \u2013 Andrea Rossini [source in Romanian] \u2013 that engineered another innovative pilot-project with Romania as a testing ground: Indygen.<\/p>\n
The future of cash payments is more and more doubtful, while payments made using systems like Bitcoin or with the mobile phone increasingly look like inroads for the revolution to come. It\u2019s unavoidable, I think.<\/p>\n
PS You can also watch at the company\u2019s dedicated page some\u00a0trulyexplanatory videos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the beginning there were Kenya and Tanzania \u2013 I\u2019ve visited them both last December and I can tell you local stores typically look like this one [photo source]. Afghanistan, India, South Africa, Mozambique and Egypt followed. Romania\u2019s next. The first European market. It doesn\u2019t look too flattering of an entourage for Romania, indeed. Yet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dstanca.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}