Mpesa

Mpesa has no news yet.

Imagine trying to buy an item from Amazon .com with no credit card. This is the challenge faced by millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. With only 3% of the population having access to credit cards, e-commerce is seen as an unviable trade solution for the vast majority of the population. However sub-saharan Africa has one thing going for it, it has the largest growth in mobile phone use across the world.We intend to tap the power of the mobile phone as a payment platform for non credit card users.
This growth in mobile phone use has prompted telecom providers to go beyond the limit of traditional operations and provide creative products that are unheard of anywhere else in the world; in Kenya for instance people use their mobile phone as a bank account. The concept works by treating each individuals phone number as their unique identifier, similar to your traditional bank account. Each subscriber is then given a unique pin that allows them to carry transactions’ such as money transfer, deposit and withdrawals. The Telkom provider has agents all over the country which are really small shops where people can deposit and withdraw money into their phones. The technology has gone a step further and now allows people to withdraw money from ATM machines.
With all the advances that I have witnessed in the mobile commerce field in Sub-Saharan Africa the question in my mind is, why not take the advances in the telecommunications industry and apply them to the field of E-commerce? Test runs of this concept indicate it can work using the same base technology that all online payment platforms are build on, however instead of users submitting their credit card details they will be inputting their mobile phone number and their unique pin identifier. This information will be sent to the authentication centre where it will be verified and if approved money will be immediately transferred from their phones to the receiving agent.
This concept will give e-commerce companies such as Amazon access to a market of 900 million potential clients, this companies can partner with existing manufacturer’s and other service providers in the region to enable user’s to purchase items online using their mobile phones instead of a credit cards, the items can then be transported to the recipient using the vast array of local and international couriers.
This concept enjoys first mover advantage as no competitors have developed any comprehensive solution to serve Sub-Saharan Africa.