A money-changer (sitting right, a wad of bills in his hand) sits in the early morning at the Seme border between Benin and Nigeria, as a woman rushes by the car of Joel Patenaude, waiting in line to find a guide for the border crossing.
Mobile payments has widened eyes throughout the financial services, technology and international development industries these past few years. It’s the next big thing, a present-tech movement that will revolutionize people’s lives and permit leapfrog progress in those parts of the world most in need of broadening financial inclusion.
On the ground though, away from the conferences, the blogs
and the Twitterverse, it’s a more complex story. If Starbucks and Safaricom
demonstrate what’s possible, dozens of other implementations demonstrate real-life,
on-the-ground hurdles. The technology has to work and fit local conditions, the
regulators must approve, business partners must commit, and the public must
adopt. And meanwhile, bills must be paid. The planets don’t align all that
often and when they do, there are not always masters-of-execution ready to
pounce.
I’ve spent the past couple of years working with a Nigerian
e-payments business and have experienced these hurdles firsthand. From customer
and agent complaints about document requirements, to integration hurdles, to weaknesses
in mobile operator data networks, it’s a long list. Innovation seduces, but its
accompanying change frightens. Most everyone agrees change is coming, but many
prefer that others act first, that rules be relaxed and costs averted.
