Challenges Facing the Use and Adoption of Mobile Phone Money Services

Abstract

The Mobile phone banking idea was initially born out of the intention to reach the unbanked rural poor. However, there still existed mobile phone money service divide, highly skewed against the rural poor population. This paper was therefore seeking to explore challenges facing mobile phone money services. Qualitative research technique was used. Further, both primary and secondary data was used. The study was conducted in Homa Bay region in Kenya, using ethnography research design. The study established that mobile phone money use and adoption had numerous challenges that had hindered it. Most affected by the challenges were the mobile phone money users and potential users from the rural poor communities. Some of the challenges included lack of national ID cards by potential users, few mobile phone money agents, inadequate cash and e-floats by the agents, awareness and lack of information on how to access and operate certain features in mobile money platform, as well as language barrier.

An Assessment of The Effect of Mobile Money Services on The Profitability of The Banking Sector in Zambia

“…Despite being relatively new, the area of mobile money services has received a lot of attention from different scholars largely due to its disruptive nature in the world of finance especially in the developing world. At the very basic level, studies in this area have focused on the factors behind its success (GSMA, 2010;Chauhan, 2015;IMF, 2019;GSMA, 2020), opportunities embedded in the innovation (Aron, 2018;Maino, et al, 2019) as well as challenges/limitations (Otieno, et al, 2016;Farooq, 2020).…”

“…Beyond the drivers, ability to bring the unbanked into the mainstream financial system, encouraging the culture of saving, potential to improve the efficiency of the financial services industry as well as employment creation are among the opportunities the innovation offers (Aron, 2018;Maino, et al, 2019). Meanwhile, insufficient agents' liquidity when it comes to servicing clients with large withdrawal needs (Otieno, et al, 2016); fraudulent activities such as identity theft, SMS scams and SIM swaps (Farooq, 2020;INTERPOL, 2020)in addition to episodes of network failure that makes the money inaccessible (Kubuga & Konjaang, 2016) are the most cited challenges.…”

Factors Impeding Mobile Money Expansion in Zambia

“…There is a large body of literature on the factors that impede the growth of mobile money services. The following factors were identified from various empirical contexts: income [6,10,11], bank account ownership [9,11,13]; age [14,15], education [10,16], sex [10,15], employment status [10,17], ease of use [6,13], perceived risk and trust [18,19] and awareness of services and benefits [17,20]. The review on factors delaying growth of mobile money from other literatures indicated that this subject is broader than what meets the eye.…”