In the past five years I've done a lot of work via my consultancy Enlightenment Economics on the economic and social impacts of mobiles in developing countries. This has included supervising reports (commissioned by Vodafone) on mobiles in Africa (2005) and on mobile transactions (2007) – both are available for download on the Vodafone website (scroll down the page). So I eagerly snap up any new publication or paper on the subject, and picked up on M-Banking: An African Financial Revolution from an article on Kenyan m-banking in the current edition of New African magazine.
The book, published under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, is based on more detailed country studies on Kenya, Senegal and South Africa. (These don't seem to have been published – no sign of them on the website.)
It has a lot of useful descriptive material and case studies looking at different approaches to m-banking in the three markets. It looks at infrastructure and market context including tax and regulation and market structure/competition. It also describes several different business models, and the judgments these involve about the potential market for m-transactions – how far towards the 'bottom of the pyramid' do the mobile operators and financial service organisations seek to reach?
I found some useful new material. One case study looks at a failed retail experiment (by Nakumatt in Kenya) using mobile vouchers, and the reasons for failure are interesting. There is also some fascinating survey-based material on trust and banking in the South African market. Another example is a useful discussion about the proportionality of regulation in applying Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering legislation in developing country markets.
Having said this, overall I found the book a disappointment. It doesn't do enough to draw lessons for either business or regulators from the descriptive material. Nor does it refer enough to the rapidly-growing literature on mobiles in general and m-transactions in particular. People interested in the regulatory implications of mobile banking would do better to start with our Vodafone report mentioned above, which sets out a pretty thorough analytical framework even though many markets have moved on since we published it three years ago.
