L’entrée des pratiques anticoncurrentielles sur le marché émergent des services de Mobile Money

The particular characteristics of mobile money mean that it is on the way to changing the landscape of financial inclusion for unbanked countries and underserved people. Financial markets are born from mobile money and now, banks and other financial institutions must challenge and compete with mobile network operators (MNO), owners of the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) which is required for providing mobile financial services by enabling service operators to access potential clients and send responses to clients confirming transactions. This relatively new role for MNOs can generate competition issues, particularly in the case where one MNO takes up a dominant position on the telecommunications market (voice and SMS services) and also plays an active role in providing mobile money services or mobile financial services. There is a reasonable fear that this operator will use its dominant position on the first market to foreclose competitors on the emerging market of mobile money services by denying non-MNO competitors access to USSD or by limiting effective access to USSD. This article aims to draw regulators? attention to these competition questions and proposes, on the basis of competitive law theories, some solutions to appropriately tackle or overcome these issues before any possible formation of an oligopoly.