IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ris/jofitr/1516.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Mobile Payments Go Viral: M-PESA in Kenya

Author

Listed:
  • Mas, Ignacio

    (Independent Consultant)

  • Radcliffe, Daniel

    (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)

Abstract

M-PESA is a small-value electronic payment and store of value system that is accessible from ordinary mobile phones. It has seen exceptional growth since its introduction by mobile phone operator Safaricom in Kenya in March 2007: it has already been adopted by 14 million customers (corresponding to 68 percent of Kenya’s adult population) and processes more transactions domestically than Western Union does globally. M-PESA’s market success can be interpreted as the interplay of three sets of factors: (i) preexisting country conditions that made Kenya a conducive environment for a successful mobile money deployment; (ii) a clever service design that facilitated rapid adoption and early capturing of network effects; and (iii) a business execution strategy that helped M-PESA rapidly reach a critical mass of customers, thereby avoiding the adverse chicken-and-egg (two-sided market) problems that afflict new payment systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Mas, Ignacio & Radcliffe, Daniel, 2011. "Mobile Payments Go Viral: M-PESA in Kenya," Journal of Financial Transformation, Capco Institute, vol. 32, pages 169-182.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:jofitr:1516
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kennedy Waweru, 2017. "Mobile Money, the Symbolism of Physical Money and Emerging Dynamics in Social Relationships among Low-Income Earners in Kenya," International Journal of Business and Management, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 12(4), pages 178-178, March.
    2. Simplice A. Asongu, 2015. "May the Soul of the IFS Financial System Definition RIP in Developing Countries," The International Journal of Economic Behavior - IJEB, Faculty of Business and Administration, University of Bucharest, vol. 5(1), pages 15-30, December.
    3. Simplice A. Asongu & Jacinta C. Nwachukwu, 2016. "Mobile Phone Penetration, Mobile Banking and Inclusive Development in Africa," The African Finance Journal, Africagrowth Institute, vol. 18(1), pages 34-52.
    4. Simplice A. Asongu, 2014. "Knowledge Economy and Financial Sector Competition in African Countries," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 26(2), pages 333-346, June.
    5. Elsie Onsongo & Johan Schot, 2017. "Inclusive Innovation and Rapid Sociotechnical Transitions: The Case of Mobile Money in Kenya," SPRU Working Paper Series 2017-07, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.
    6. Simplice A. Asongu, 2013. "How has Mobile Phone Penetration Stimulated Financial Development in Africa?," Journal of African Business, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(1), pages 7-18, April.
    7. Simplice Asongu, 2015. "The impact of mobile phone penetration on African inequality," International Journal of Social Economics, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 42(8), pages 706-716, August.
    8. Larios-Hernández, Guillermo Jesús, 2017. "Blockchain entrepreneurship opportunity in the practices of the unbanked," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 60(6), pages 865-874.
    9. Asongu Simplice, 2013. "Mobile banking and mobile phone penetration: which is more pro-poor in Africa?," Working Papers of the African Governance and Development Institute. 13/033, African Governance and Development Institute..
    10. Tristan Dissaux, 2023. "Geographies of Monetary Exclusion in Kenyan Slums: Financial Inclusion in Question," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 54(1), pages 87-116, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    mobile; mobile payments; mobile money; Kenya; M-PESA; financial inclusion;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O16 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:jofitr:1516. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Prof. Shahin Shojai (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.capco.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.