Markets

Penetration of mobile services around the world has increased rapidly, with the subscriber base worldwide growing from just over 11 million mobile phone users in 1990 to over 3 billion in 2008. Growth is particularly impressive in developing economies, where on the other hand, financial services for the poor is still a major issue. This is particularly evident in the lack of affordable and convenient, essential services; such as money transfer. Sending small denominations via Bank transfers and specialist remittance providers can be prohibitively expensive mainly because their current services have the built-in cost of their physical and distribution infrastructure as well as cash handling.

Realising the Opportunity.

The mobile device has the potential to extend the access of financial services to the banked as well as to the under-served and unbanked parts of the population. This improved financial service delivery can be achieved through exploiting the reach of the mobile networks and the ubiquity of the mobile phone in the hands of consumers around the world.

There is a substantial business opportunity, given that every year an estimated 200 million international migrant workers will regularly remit money to their home countries with remittance flows around $300 billion annually.

In essence mobile money transfer services can make remittances more affordable. Mobile technology lowers the cost of remittances by removing the need for physical points of presence and by providing a real-time and secure method of transacting and removing some of the dependency on cash.

Including mobile money transfer in the early phases of establishing a mobile financial services enterprise platform provides a solid financial underpinning to the business case.

The power of technology.

The Fundamo enterprise mobile financial service platform was developed to harness the ubiquity of mobile phones and their obvious application in the banking and payment space. The solution is exceptional because it was designed and built to specifically cater for the unique characteristics of the mobile phone and the mobile user experience, and has been proven and fine-tuned in production environments over the past 9 years. We know that to serve these markets the mobile user experience plays a crucial role; in particular it has to be simple and easy to use.