IN KENYA mobile money has become central to the country’s economy. M-PESA, a service that allows money to be sent and received using mobile phones, has now been adopted by 70% of the adult population and is a conduit for 25% of Kenya’s GNP. Yet elsewhere such services have had limited success, even though there is no lack of demand. In India, for instance, only an estimated 30,000 of the 600,000 villages in the country have bank branches. Little wonder that 700m Indians, or nearly two-thirds of the population, don’t have accounts.
Now mobile money seems to be finally taking off outside Kenya. In both Bangladesh and India mobile-money services now boast a sizeable number of users. And in both cases it is clever entrepreneurs who have pushed things along—rather than a big telecoms operator, as was the case in Kenya.
In Bangladesh bKash has garnered a following of 2.2m users. It has more than 30,000 retail agents, almost one in every two villages, allowing most rural Bangladeshis to use digital cash (see picture). In India BEAM has signed up 14m customers and does 1m transactions every month