Ignacio Mas is executive director at the Digital Frontier Institute. He is also senior fellow at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the Saïd Business School at Oxford University.
If you want to displace informal savings options, you need to at least incorporate those features that people really like about informal options, and then you need to add a compelling argument to switch.
PIN sharing is recurring problem amongst mobile money users. However, providers should realize that when people do something with a product that they are not intended to, the reaction shouldn’t be “educate!” but rather to see what about the product can be changed to accommodate the behavior of the customer in a better way.
Are payment dongles like Square democratizing retail electronic payments by eliminating the need for dedicated point-of-sale terminals. Is the growth curve of Square an indication that similar low-cost acquiring solutions could trigger an explosion of merchant payments in developing countries?
A financial service for the base of the pyramid must, at its core, help people with their financial planning. This notion can help articulate the logic of user interface design. A provider that helps people plan better will be in a better position to promote its own financial products.
Getting people to reach for their bank card or mobile phone at the store check-out requires giving them good reasons to store their money electronically.
