PaymentView is an extension to FrontlineSMS, meaning that as well as new payments functionality it includes all of the benefits of the core SMS communication platform, such as easy communication with staff members or clients and the ability to send reminders and auto-replies. The public beta release version is configured to work with Safaricom’s M-Pesa system in Kenya, and can support any SMS or STK-based payment service with a bit of software development.

The beta version of PaymentView is already being implemented to:

• Enable microfinance borrowers to repay loans via mobile phone to rural microfinance branches
• Expand the availability of an innovative family savings/life insurance product
• Pay salaries for laborers constructing rural renewable energy projects and farm workers
• Help small businesses operate more efficiently

Dairy farm using PaymentView to pay farm workers’ salaries

Since our last update, we have been working to bring on a variety of testers, including an agricultural information provider that is collecting subscription fees for market information services, and a research project that is disbursing financial incentives to intervention assistants.

At present, PaymentView is not a full release but a ‘beta’ release, which means it is in a testing stage of development. We are currently seeking organizations in Kenya that want to partner with us to test the software. Visit our software page to download PaymentView and the user guide to get started. We also offer some free user resources available via the FrontlineSMS user forum. Sign up for an account and join the Mobile Money group to connect with other PaymentView users. If you have a technical support question, please read through our FAQs first. If you do not find what you are looking for, post your question on the user forum and we will do our best to get back to you as soon as possible, and generally within 24 hours.

Training Nunguni FSA staff on how to use PaymentView

This launch is the start of many exciting things to come for FrontlineSMS:Credit. We are continuing work on our next software release, which can support any mobile payment system (with a bit of software development), enabling organizations to adapt PaymentView for use anywhere in the world. Later this year, we’ll be building a more powerful version of the software that will focus on using FrontlineSMS for managing mobile money accounts, airtime accounts, and mobile vouchers all from one interface.

If you are based outside of Kenya and wish to use PaymentView, join our mailing list to receive updates or email us at info@credit.frontlinesms.com to find out when PaymentView will be available for use in your region. We would also love to hear your feedback on the software, and our future plans! Send us an email at info@credit.frontlinesms.com to let us know what you think, or to give suggestions for features you’d like to see in future releases.

FrontlineSMS:Credit is currently preparing for the launch of our very first software product, PaymentView, which will be available for public download by the end of March. PaymentView is an extension to FrontlineSMS that allows the user to send, receive, and manage mobile payments. The software is currently configured for use with M-PESA in Kenya. We are now testing the software with a variety of different organizations, from agribusinesses, to microinsurance providers, to financial services associations. The road from the beginning of FrontlineSMS:Credit to today has been a long one, and not without some setbacks, but we are proud of how far we have come since the project began.

Rural Splash Cash agent, Sierra Leone

FrontlineSMS:Credit originally started as CreditSMS.   The project was instigated by Ben Lyon in 2009, and inspired by the growing potential of mobile technology in Africa, especially mobile money and M-PESA.  Ben had the original idea for using FrontlineSMS’s interface as a mobile money management tool, and was able to connect with Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS:Medic (now Medic Mobile).  When they met Ben pitched the idea of FrontlineSMS + M-PESA, and Josh said to go for it.  Josh provided valuable encouragement for the idea, and Ben started building out the concept under the name CreditSMS. Eventually CreditSMS became a project of FrontlineSMS, called FrontlineSMS:Credit.

In January 2010, Ben met Nathan Wyeth, who would later become the second director of FrontlineSMS:Credit. Nathan was investigating the mobile money sector around the world, and interviewed Ben for a blog post about FrontlineSMS:Credit for NextBillion.net. Soon after, he volunteered to help Ben work on the project. Around the same time, Ben began to develop the very first version of PaymentView with a global network of volunteers. He then applied for and won Vodafone’s Wireless Innovation Project competition which provided the initial funding for PaymentView.

Manual reconciliation of payment data, Sierra Leone pilot

The first pilot of PaymentView took place using Splash Cash in Freetown, Sierra Leone in May 2010 and proved to be a real learning experience. The team quickly gathered that the solution they were offering did not fit the organization they were partnering with. PaymentView allowed the user to both send and receive payments, even though the partner MFI had only asked for the ability to accept loan repayments. In addition, PaymentView linked to a different MIS than the one the partner MFI was using, and the difference between the two was not trivial. The challenges of the pilot helped to inform the further development of our software, our approach to selecting and working with partner organizations, and most importantly, our ability to design appropriate projects.

After the pilot ended, Ben headed to Boulder, CO to attend the very first Unreasonable Institute, an accelerator for social entrepreneurs. He met other talented and driven social innovators and connected with advisors and investors. He worked on FrontlineSMS:Credit all summer, further developing the idea and making plans for future expansion, which led to his Pop!Tech Fellowship in the fall of 2010 and significant press attention for the project.

Through his experience at Unreasonable Institute, Ben made the decision to hand over FrontlineSMS:Credit to Nathan and move on to a new position, as founder of a company called Kopo Kopo, where he is now the Vice President of Business Development. He says he is grateful for his time at FrontlineSMS because it helped to shape his career path and taught him how to lead a successful project.

M-Pesa agent in Salama, Kenya

Nathan took over fully by late fall 2011, and moved the project to Nairobi, Kenya, one of the epicenters of mobile money, where he planned to build a user community before expanding the project internationally. (Side note: Funny enough, Nathan and Ben lived together and worked in the same co-working space, the iHub, for several months during 2011.)

Nathan hired new developers and began building the version of PaymentView we’ll soon be releasing. Nathan rethought the role that PaymentView could play in the Kenyan context and began building the software based on some of the lessons of the original pilot, but strongly tailoring the software for the growing community of potential users in Kenya. By June, the staff began to expand with three summer fellows and me, the new FrontlineSMS:Credit Operations Manager.

Making a loan repayment via M-Pesa…

Over the next few months, the summer fellows delved into a variety of sectors to learn more about how mobile money could be used and I worked on securing beta users for the PaymentView software we have been building. We interviewed potential users in agriculture, financial services, and health to find out how mobile payments could increase efficiency and cut costs. We found that the possibilities were endless, from enabling loan repayments to be made remotely, to distributing payments for farmers’ crops without the farmers having to meet at a central point, to paying community health workers’ salaries with mobile money. Mobile money allows organizations to provide better services to their clients and save on operating costs. Some of the savings groups we are working with have reduced travel time for repayments from a full day to under an hour and cut the cost of the transaction in half.

…and receiving it to be reconciled in the office

Fast forward a few months, and we’re ready to release the PaymentView beta into the world for live testing. The FrontlineSMS:Credit team is now moving full steam ahead, building on the foundation that Nathan built over the last year (he has since moved on and I’ve taken over as Project Manager). We are hard at work expanding our user base and adding USSD support to PaymentView so that a developer anywhere will be able to build an integration into any mobile money system in the world (currently we can only support SMS and STK-based systems).

We are currently seeking testers in Kenya who are willing to use the software and provide feedback to us. If you are interested in helping us to test the software, please email us at info@credit.frontlinesms.com for more information. If you are based outside of Kenya and want to learn more or be notified when we the international version is ready for testing, please visit our website and join our mailing list.

We discussed the process for remitting a payment, which has a couple of different parts. First, the group must cover the transfer and withdrawal fees charged by Safaricom for the use of M-PESA which vary depending on the amount. So it is essential that the group understand how to add the appropriate amount to their deposit and transfer to ensure that Nunguni FSA receives the correct amount. Second, the group must submit a report of each individual’s total payment via SMS. Erica and I worked with Matthew and Denis to ensure they understood the process well as we would be relying on them to educate all of the savings groups who will be participating in the pilot phase. (Group meetings are conducted in Kamba, so we knew we wouldn’t be able to understand everything that was going on as the loan officers trained the groups.)

After the training session, we all headed to the first group meeting in Kalembwani. Our group consisted of me, Erica, Joseph from KFS, Nunguni FSA manager Daudi, and both Matthew and Denis. It was quite an eventful meeting – Erica even got a marriage proposal – and definitely a successful training. Denis did a fantastic job describing the new system for remitting payments, and the group members were enthusiastic. The group collected and recorded their savings and loan repayments and we went with Mary, the chairperson, to the nearest M-PESA agent in Kiu to make a deposit and transfer. Unfortunately, we bumped into one of the challenges of the M-PESA system: the agent at Kiu did not have enough float! So we headed to the next town, Salama, where Mary was able to make the transaction.

Kalembwani savings group taking notes

Kiu M-Pesa agent is located next to the Kiu train station

While driving to Salama, Erica and I chatted with Mary about her participation in the savings group. She has been a member of the Kalembwani savings group for several years and has been the chairperson for the past year. She is a single mother, and has used the loans to buy a piece of land, build a house and some other buildings, pay school fees for her children, and even start her own business. She told us that she had no access to credit until Nunguni FSA came along. It was quite impressive to meet a successful entrepreneur who had really taken advantage of microfinance to better her situation and that of her family.

Salama M-PESA agent

Mary makes a payment

We left Mary at Salama to find a matatu back home while the rest of us returned to Nunguni to find out whether the payment had come through. Success! With that, Erica, Joseph, and I drove off to Emali, where we would be spending the night. After a feast of nyama choma and chips, we called it a night. We woke up early the next morning to go back to Nunguni, which was incredibly foggy due to the high elevation and overcast skies. We spent the first part of the morning training the accountant, Peter, and the cashier, Mary, on how to use PaymentView to do reconciliation of a group payment. We planned to implement the process in the afternoon, once we had received a few payments.

Despite the bad weather, we headed off to a group meeting. This time, we were lucky enough to train two groups at the same time, as they held meetings at the same location and on the same day of the month. Matthew took the lead in explaining the new process to Tengemeo and Mwanzo Mpya savings groups, who were equally enthusiastic about the new system. Once we completed the training, we went with the two group leaders to remit the money. The closest M-Pesa agent had insufficient float, but the next one, within walking distance, was able to complete the transaction.

Matthew training Tengemeo and Mwanzo Mpya savings groups

Daudi and Denis record payments

After both groups remitted their payments, we were back to the office to make sure the payments had been received by PaymentView. Both had shown up! Erica and I worked with Peter to process the payments and reconcile the amounts with the group collection sheets that the loan officers had brought from the meetings. After a brief conversation with Daudi, the Nunguni FSA manager, about cashing out the SIM card, we were ready to depart for Nairobi.

Nearby M-Pesa agent

Both group leaders make payments

Since the visit, Denis and Matthew are responsible for training the rest of the 13 groups who are participating in the pilot, with the guidance of Daudi. Check back for more project updates – we’ll be visiting Nunguni again next month.

The combined value of SMS and payments for interacting within organizations and with clients and customers comes up in all kinds of organizations, big and small.  PaymentView, the plug-in that extends the FrontlineSMS platform to send, receive, and manage mobile payments (first in Kenya and soon elsewhere), inherently connects payments and SMS by virtue of sitting next to an SMS messaging hub, so that you can do both of these things from a single, easy desktop setup.

For a small business owner we spoke to recently, mobile payments will be an efficiency improvement over collecting cash from the clients to whom he has couriers deliver goods.  But what he’s most excited about is using SMS to conduct marketing blasts announcing sales (which he can of course target to certain users from FrontlineSMS).  One can imagine many similar situations for NGOs.

Collecting mobile payments may be the first time that accurate phone numbers are guaranteed to be collected, and moreover, put in an organized format conducive to sending communications.  For larger organizations, shifting to mobile payments thus opens up new opportunities for communication.

• Sending an SMS confirming that a mobile transaction has gone through and been counted by an organization is key.  After all, the worst possible situation for a microfinance client repaying a loan via mobile would be to get a transaction confirmation via SMS from the mobile money platform but not to know whether their account had been credited.

• Having an SMS query system for inquiring about balances or due dates is another thing we get asked about frequently, and which PaymentView will enable.  This is something banks have as part of mobile banking packages, but otherwise unavailable to the organizations we serve, like rural MFIs.

• Finally, notifications when a payment comes in that are sent to staff elsewhere in an organization via SMS can be a powerful tool to get information to where it can be acted on best.  This could be in a distribution chain – i.e. to a delivery truck driver, “Payment has been received, you may proceed to your next delivery” – or in an MFI, for a loan officer to be notified that a delinquent borrower had sent in a payment and she or he doesn’t need to check up on them again.

Last week, FrontlineSMS:Credit ventured out to the Nyanza Province to meet with three potential PaymentView users: Kisumu Medical and Education Trust (K-MET), ACK Development Services Nyanza (ADS), and the IPA Mumias Information Welfare and Advances (MIWA) Project. K-MET and ADS, both based in Kisumu, have similar challenges. Both have customers spread out across a geographically diverse area making it difficult to collect payments. It is clients like these that remind us why mobile payments can be so powerful in reaching rural populations. Moving cash is risky and moving it long distances is even riskier (K-MET has clients traveling over 25km). It is also time-consuming and expensive. Every hour spent traveling is also an hour of lost income. This compounded cost of travel expenses and lost income can prevent those most in need from participating in loan programs. Mobile money services and software like PaymentView can eliminate this problem for a large portion of customers and allow organizations to reach whole new populations.

ADS also faces the challenge of tracking and recording payments. They currently accept M-PESA payments, but all money is sent to the mobile phone of one of their project leads. While this provides a convenience to the end-user, when too many payments come in on a given day, payment information can be lost when the phone’s inbox runs out of space.  PaymentView will retain information on all payments, increasing efficiency and data accuracy for ADS.

The meeting with IPA’s MIWA project stood in stark contrast to the meetings with K-MET and ADS. The MIWA project is run in coordination with the Mumias Sugar Factory and its Sukari SACCO. Our meeting was held in the SACCO’s boardroom which featured a polished hardwood table, leather chairs, and even a laptop and projector. Ceiling fans made the room comfortable and they even served refreshments – what a treat! Definitely not what we see in a typical meeting.

So a little about the MIWA project. MIWA works with Mumias sugar cane farmers to smooth income by providing a percentage of their projected income at 3 months and 6 months prior to harvest. Currently, payments are dispersed by the Sukari SACCO, which requires all participating farmers to come to Mumias to receive payment. There are benefits to this in that each participating farmer has an account with the SACCO and access to all of its financial services.

Entrance to the Mumias Sugar Factory

As much as we enjoyed Mumias, Kisumu was also quite pleasant. When not in meetings we spent our time working on the shore of Lake Victoria. The lake breeze made the day go by quickly. And the fresh pineapple and passion fruit juice hit the spot after traversing the dusty roads between Mumias and Kisumu.

Sunset in Kisumu

Nunguni FSA has nearly 6,000 members, including just over 50 savings groups of about 20 members each.  Approximately 10 of these groups will be participating in the pilot, which will enable them to send in their monthly payments via M-PESA.  Many of the groups are a long journey from the FSA, and are currently taking up to a full day each month to deliver their payments.  By using M-PESA, group members save time and money, as M-PESA agents are located within easy walking distance of group meetings.

Joseph Maina, IT manager for KFS, accompanied Roy (one of our esteemed software developers) and me on the journey to Nunguni.  We arrived just after 9 am, took tea with the FSA’s manager Daudi and some of the loan officers, and then proceeded with the software installation.  Once Roy had PaymentView up and running at the FSA (a quick and easy process, if we do say so ourselves!), we did a training session with the staff in which I explained all of the features they will be utilizing for the pilot.  The staff members then spent some time using the program themselves, and they seemed quite comfortable with its functions.  So far, so good.

Training Nunguni FSA staff

Testing a payment

Next, we drove over to Kaeani, a small village to visit the Wendo wa Kaeani savings group at their monthly meeting.  As Daudi explained the new system by which the group could send money using M-PESA, the group members were excited to use it.  They asked a lot of questions about how it would work, and after everyone agreed that it was a good idea, we headed over to the M-PESA agent to send the group’s loan repayments and savings to Nunguni FSA.  At the agent, Christina Muthenya was the lucky group member who got to use her phone to send the payment.  She deposited the group’s money and transferred it to the FSA’s M-PESA account.

Wendo wa Kaeani savings group

Sending a loan repayment

Confirmed!

We headed back to Nunguni to find out whether the payment was received by PaymentView, and a dialog box had popped up, informing us that a new payment had been received.  Success!  Daudi then sent an SMS to Christina, informing her that her payment was received by the FSA, with a paper receipt to follow next month.

As such, microinsurance policies have been designed with viability and ease of distribution in mind; client-centric design is a luxury that most providers haven’t yet been able to breach. Instead, simplicity is the rule—a fair and necessary condition in the provision of financial services, but a recent conversation with the head of MicroEnsure’s Kenya office shed light on the potential for mobile payments to set microinsurance free, both in terms of distribution and product design.

According to a report by the ILO’s Microinsurance Innovation Facility, market potential exceeds 700 million people in Africa alone (excluding the poorest who can’t afford such a product), whereas current coverage stands at a paltry 15 million. Partly, this is because ¾ of microinsurance policies are bundled with microfinance loans, by far the simplest distribution model.

What if, instead of packaging microinsurance as an add-on product, potential customers could purchase stand-alone policies with no frills attached? Some of this is happening already, in the form of one-off policies that can be purchased from retailers’ shelves along with one’s weekly groceries. And already, two mobile insurance products offered by MicroEnsure Ghana in partnership with Tigo and MTN have doubled insurance penetration in the country.

Ms. Kate Waiganjo of MicroEnsure dreams of going two steps further. With mobile money and SMS registration, she envisions a new model by which individuals could opt to purchase life or other insurance schemes as and when they see fit. No longer would they have to belong to a savings or credit group to do so, nor would their options be limited to a one-size-fits-all product. The introduction of mobile payments would allow individuals to pay in installments, with the possibility of increasing levels of coverage as they go.

Ordinarily, individual microinsurance schemes would cost up to twice as much as group-based schemes, but mobile money may change that by slashing operation costs considerably. It remains to be seen whether transaction fees would be prohibitive for individuals wishing to opt-in, but from preliminary conversations with potential end-users, the convenience of mobile money may just trump these concerns.

In the coming months, FrontlineSMS:Credit will be working with MicroEnsure to do just what Ms. Waiganjo has imagined – allow individuals to purchase microinsurance plans without having to be a member of a savings group.  Premium payments will be sent in to MicroEnsure via M-PESA, and the use of FrontlineSMS + PaymentView will allow MicroEnsure to monitor all of the program participants through real-time data about when each participant has paid, how much, and what their total remaining monthly balance is.  By leveraging the efficiency and ease of using mobile money, hundreds of people will be able to access life insurance policies that are vital for protecting their families in the event of a tragedy.

In the last two weeks I have had several enlightening conversations with organizations working with clients in various agriculture value chains. These informative meetings highlighted the challenge of a scattered value chain. Cotton ginneries, for example, hire field agents to buy cotton from smallholders. “Superagents” travel from kiosk to kiosk checking on field agents and ensure that they have enough cash. In the dairy sector, milk is often sold to middlemen who transport it—on foot, by bicycle, or in trucks—to chilling plants where it is chilled and then sold/sent to processing plants.

Distance results in many challenges: employees at agro-processing plants must travel long distances with large amount of cash to pay smallholder farmers or ensure that buyers have enough float, which is both costly and potentially insecure. Often, farmers must wait weeks or months to receive a cash payment, and often end up credit constrained. Dairy farmers, for example, frequently wait several weeks to be paid for their milk, which increases the incentive to sell milk into the informal sector where they are paid right away.

FrontlineSMS:Credit believes that our product can help close the distance gap in value chains. By facilitating mobile money payments, we can ensure that business processes are streamlined and that farmers can access payments regularly and keep them secure.

Making the very first M-PESA transaction!

Wednesday, July 20^th marked a magic moment for FrontlineSMS:Credit. A routine visit to one of our first pilot customers, the Nunguni Financial Services Association (FSA), resulted in the first incoming payment to our PaymentView beta software.

FSAs are locally-owned and managed financial service providers, targeting rural populations throughout Kenya. They function much like microfinance institutions, providing the opportunity to obtain credit and save via a group-based model, with each FSA serving anywhere from 3,000 to 7,000 clients.

Nunguni, located two hours from Nairobi off the Mombasa highway, lies tucked away in the mountains, making it feel much more remote than its relative proximity to the capital. Myself, Sharon (our Operations Manager), and Kim (developer extraordinaire) arrived to demonstrate the beta version in real-time (i.e. sending test M-PESA payments from loan officer to PaymentView and vice versa) and to allow staff to familiarize themselves with its functionality. We worked with the FSA manager, Daudi, as well as several loan officers and other staff members.

After the software demo, we were whisked away to meet with one of the FSA’s credit groups to try a live payment. Simon, the loan officer for the group, went ahead to prepare the group for our arrival, and we followed with Daudi. The group met approximately 13 kilometers away, along a dusty, winding road with not a bus or matatu in sight. The Nunguni FSA group members meet monthly to repay loans and contribute savings. The group’s treasurer is then tasked with traveling to the FSA to deposit the group’s contributions, with all members pitching in for transportation.

For this particular group, one trip would typically cost 400 Kenyan Shillings ($5 USD) and anywhere from half to a full day of lost work for the treasurer. The majority of groups live further away, though, from 25 to 40 kilometers. Understandably, this amounts to a significant sum of money over time and an amalgam of transportation modes to complete the journey—from walking to buses to matatus to motorbikes—served with a headache on the side.

The happy group

The group had no idea we were coming, but upon explanation of PaymentView and their ability to simply send loan repayments to the FSA from now on via M-PESA, members broke into heartfelt smiles and applause. It was the most unexpected, yet wonderful (and yes, truly magical) culmination to my summer with FrontlineSMS:Credit. Having focused on transaction costs and efficiencies, supply chains and distribution models, I had temporarily lost sight of our end (and most important) beneficiaries—the clients of the organizations that we will ultimately be working with. It was also incredibly humbling to see the intersection of technology and development come to life.

We accompanied the treasurer, as well as Simon and Daudi, to the M-PESA agent next door and watched with giddiness (this moment has been long in the making by our team of developers) as she sent the first payment. The process took all of five minutes and culminated with M-PESA’s trusty confirmation of payment.

This marks the beginning of a new and exciting chapter for FrontlineSMS:Credit and for inclusive rural finance in Kenya, and we hope, beyond.

How can mobile money systems be designed to be more financially inclusive? What’s a financial inclusion ‘wishlist’ for these platforms?

I spoke with colleagues in Nairobi, thought about the barriers we encounter when we talk with organizations working with the poor about using mobile payments, and identified 8 ideas. Some may better better than others, and some are more original than others, but here they are. As anyone who knows him would expect, Ben Lyon of Kopo Kopo deserves credit for great ideas on the technical systems underlying mobile money and how they interact with the rest of the financial sector, as well as how enterprises can interact with these systems.

1. If bank involvement is required, enable agency banking and keep KYC requirements realistic for rural areas.

If bank involvement is required, agency banking contracted to mobile money operators, combined with KYC requirements that are realistic for rural areas, can keep mobile money systems accessible. Requirements like photocopies of ID cards do little if anything to promote security of the banking system and simply create a serious barrier to rural customers.

2. Encourage mobile money for commerce by creating small businesses accounts.

In many cases nothing exists between personal accounts and corporate accounts for bill payment and the like. This means that small and medium enterprises will accept mobile payments, but to personal accounts of employees and within the transaction limits set for individual users. While mobile money can easily be a tool for improved financial and business management and customer interaction, paying to personal accounts creates headaches at best and opportunities for fraud, theft and customer mistrust at worst.

A small business account would be an easy thing for mobile payment operators to create. This could include features like:

• Opened in the name of the business by the owner or authorized agent
• Higher daily account limits, for example, to pay salaries, with option for account owner to set custom limits below this to prevent fraud/theft.
• Retrieve account history via SMS for security and financial management

3. Make it easy to get an enterprise connection to a mobile money account.

It is not enough to make it possible for urban, sophisticated banks and corporations to build real-time, web-based connections to payment systems so that they can handle transactions at volume. Account updates should be easy to obtain via web and SMS and in formats (APIs, etc.) that make it possible for any organization using payments at volume that do have their own electronic recordkeeping to bring this data directly into such systems.

4. Ensure that mobile payments conform to financial industry standards

Employing industry-wide standards will hasten the adoption of mobile money alongside the existing architecture of the financial industry and increase the comfort that regulators have with this new form of money transfer. This includes standardized data format methods for enterprise connections (ISO 8583) and data security standards in line with those used by payment cards (PSI-DSS).

5. Price to encourage micropayments

Tariffs are set to encourage people to deposit funds on a mobile money account and send large amounts, by declining as a percentage from the minimum to maximum amounts sent. For example, the minimum amount that can be sent via M-PESA is 50 KES ($0.55), and at this level the fee is 15 KES ($0.17). Rather than hitting the smallest payments with the relatively largest fees, incentives could encourage frequent use with the expectation that this will grow usage for medium and large size transfers for example, a 2 KES ($0.03) fee on all transfers under 50 KES or 100 KES ($1.10). This would also allow the most creative uses of mobile money like targeted savings and installment plans – to flourish by making it possible for the poor to deposit or send money frequently and in small amounts, the same way their savings actually accrue.

6. Make microdeposits easy.

Make it easy for the urban poor to quickly and efficiently put daily earnings onto a mobile money account. Along with reduced fees for sending micropayments, deposits of small amounts could be allowed with greater ease than with larger deposits. For example, in Kenya not requiring verification of ID to deposit up to 200 KES ($2.20) per day into an account for a phone that one is physically holding at a mobile money agent. There could also be mobile money agents who are deposit-taking only. A deposit-only agent could have a streamlined system for quickly depositing daily earnings that prevent long lines, and for whom e-float management would much simpler and akin to any inventory management.

7. Price for bulk payments

As with bulk SMS pricing that makes it feasible to use SMS as a wholesale marketing tool, usage of sending payments at volume should be rewarded with reduced fees. In Kenya, Safaricom privately negotiates volume discounts for large Pay Bill customers, reducing the fees that people pay to send them a payment.This is a first step towards making it easy to use payments in bulk. Bulk prices should be transparent and advertised for enterprises. Volume pricing should apply both to incoming payments and outgoing payments.

8. Engaging and educating technology providers is key

To a significant degree, the feature set for mobile money systems is driven by technology providers that serve mobile network operators. To drive the creation of mobile money platforms that maximize financial inclusion, these firms must understand measures that increase financial inclusion and strengthen the business case for mobile money systems, include them in their platforms, and advocate for them with operators.