The Mobey Forum was founded in 2000 - almost at the same time that Fundamo was established. Many companies and industry organisations that was founded during those early times, disappeared. There something of a resilience that I sense in the survivors. Now that the industry is starting to take off and that more and more banks are starting to announce their interest in mobile banking it is important to take cognisance of organisations that have been around. Some of the lessons learned and the insights (like good wine) can only be gathered through time.What is refreshing about the Mobey Forum is the changes that have been made in the past few months. I believe this is a direct result of good leadership and expect the Forum to play an important role to make mobile banking mainstream banking business as it should be. Some of the important advances at Mobey Forum are the following:
- Invitation to other players in the ecosystem to join the Forum. Up to recently the Forum was definitely bank-centric, but some of the leading mobile operators as well as solution providers have now also joined.
- Discussion and communication with the GSM Association is also a step in the right direction.
- The development of specific models, but with sufficient emphasis on bank-robust security requirements is also good. In the end mobile banking and payments is about dealing with client's money and the same levels of security available in other channels should also be made available on mobile phones.
6 comments:
Hey Hannes
How many of the big consumer banks in South Africa have a mobile banking solution? Or is the question better phrased "how many don't?"
Hi Chris
I had some fingertrouble with the previous post.
In South Africa, all banks have mobile banking offerings, as a matter of fact, most banks have more than one. The first deployment was in production early 2003. Many of the banks can demonstrate positive business cases in less than two years after deployment. All three the mobile operators support mobile banking as delivered by all of the banks. One of them (MTN) provides their own mobile banking offering.
The functionality and features provided by the banks are very advanced with sophisticated money transfer and payment capabilities and bank card integration. My company (Fundamo) provides solutions to a number of the large banks.
One could classify mobile banking offerings in two categories. Simple information based mobile banking and then more advanced secure transactional banking. Regarding the firs category, conservative estimates are that the banks have more than five million subscribers, while about a million subscribers are registered for the more advanced transactional banking - this number is growing fast. This is not too bad if one considers that about 15 million people are "banked", and about 2.5 million are registered for Internet banking.
hey hannes have you heard of
www.etranzact.com
Of course I know of eTranzact. Many good companies provide solutions in the mobile banking space, and a big percentage of them are actually based in Africa.
Semicon is a leading mobile payment solution company in Bangladesh. Mobile banking, mobile payment, mobile ticketing, mobile billing are the major services provided by semicon in Bangladesh.
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