10 Days in Kenya with 1 Phone & 0 Cash
June 11, 2014 – People in Kenya conduct US$822 million in monthly mobile payments using M-pesa, a platform though which money is transferred from one party to another via text message.
Charles Graeber recently published in Bloomberg Business Week on his cashless travel experience in that county. Having never used mobile to pay, even in his home county of the United States, his goal was to learn about how Kenyans are making mobile payments work and are gaining international notoriety for being the leader in cashless transactions.
Exchanging his cash for a mobile phone and pre-paid data and air-time cards in an airport parking-lot kiosk, the author says, “I feel like a caveman who’s just been handed a Bic lighter”.
He spends his time in Kenya paying for everything from taxis in urban cities to bananas in rural markets purely through text.
The article exposes some of the security enhancing and graft-reducing benefits of mobile payments, along with the opportunities for personal connectivity that mobile payments create – after all, the payer and payee are exchanging phone numbers.
Read more about Graber’s adventures in cashless travel here: http://www.businessweek.com/