(Haven’t read this article yet). Have you looked into Wave? They’re an EA-affliated startup that’s trying to expand mobile money into more locations. (My understanding is that it’s the same team that created Sendwave)
Wave is really amazing, but if I am not getting it wrong, their focus is sending money from abroad to the country in a much cheaper way. But my main concern in this post is stepping up electronic money within country. I think it would be interesting to also promote the expansion of Wave into untouched territory for similar reasons than the ones above (they create wealth for people in developing countries). But note that many of those remittances are sent to people who might not be considered “extreme poor”. The extreme poor are less likely to have relatives abroad sending them money, be it with Wave or with MoneyGram or any other company.
Browsing through the website I also see they make deposits and withdrawals for free, which is better than most Mobile Money service providers, and that they provide services to Orange. Orange has a mobile money service too, so I wonder if they are providing the software to them, rather than competing with them directly. I wish someone could clarify this.
Also, Wave is operating in many countries, but not all.
For the focus of this concept, I am more concerned with providing Mobile Money from the most relevant and fair company available (whoever that is) to areas and people that so far did not have that service, rather than promoting movements from one company to the other which might be more efficient but will have a much smaller effect in poverty reduction.
Wave is really amazing, but if I am not getting it wrong, their focus is sending money from abroad to the country in a much cheaper way.
My understanding is that this was the old focus of wave (The remittances part of the company is now rebranded Sendwave). IIUC, the current iteration of Wave is focused on making mobile money more popular.
It would be great to know more about their current expansion, and how do they approach countries that already have Mobile Money operators. I hope someone can clarify this, the website does not have much information.
Sorry for the minimalist website :) A couple clarifications:
We indeed split our businesses into Sendwave (international money transfer) and Wave (mobile money). Wave.com is the website for the latter.
The latter currently operates only in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire (stay tuned though).
In addition to charging no fees for deposits or withdrawals, we charge a flat 1% to send. All in, I believe we’re about 80% cheaper than Orange Money for typical transaction sizes.
We don’t provide services to Orange—if you saw the logo on the website it’s just because we let our customers use their Wave balance to purchase Orange airtime.
For the focus of this concept, I am more concerned with providing Mobile Money from the most relevant and fair company available (whoever that is) to areas and people that so far did not have that service, rather than promoting movements from one company to the other which might be more efficient but will have a much smaller effect in poverty reduction.
This is our goal as well; to quote myself in another comment:
Despite the fact that M-Pesa started in 2008, mobile money in most other countries in sub-Saharan Africa is kind of crap by comparison (much more expensive, worse service, smaller agent network, etc.) because most telecoms have not even been able to copycat M-Pesa effectively. By executing better, you can speed up the adoption of mobile money.
Even Orange (which is fairly widespread in Senegal) has only gotten 25% of their own userbase onto mobile money (source) because they, like most mobile money systems, are executing really badly compared to what’s possible. There is a lot of room to make mobile money more accessible even in countries with already-existing mobile money. (Which at this point is nearly all countries AFAIK—it’s easy for a telecom to buy an off the shelf mobile money service from something like Ericsson or Huawei—much harder for them to actually execute well on rolling it out.)
(Haven’t read this article yet). Have you looked into Wave? They’re an EA-affliated startup that’s trying to expand mobile money into more locations. (My understanding is that it’s the same team that created Sendwave)
Why was this comment downvoted?
Wave is really amazing, but if I am not getting it wrong, their focus is sending money from abroad to the country in a much cheaper way. But my main concern in this post is stepping up electronic money within country. I think it would be interesting to also promote the expansion of Wave into untouched territory for similar reasons than the ones above (they create wealth for people in developing countries). But note that many of those remittances are sent to people who might not be considered “extreme poor”. The extreme poor are less likely to have relatives abroad sending them money, be it with Wave or with MoneyGram or any other company.
Browsing through the website I also see they make deposits and withdrawals for free, which is better than most Mobile Money service providers, and that they provide services to Orange. Orange has a mobile money service too, so I wonder if they are providing the software to them, rather than competing with them directly. I wish someone could clarify this.
Also, Wave is operating in many countries, but not all.
For the focus of this concept, I am more concerned with providing Mobile Money from the most relevant and fair company available (whoever that is) to areas and people that so far did not have that service, rather than promoting movements from one company to the other which might be more efficient but will have a much smaller effect in poverty reduction.
More info on wave:
https://www.wave.com/en/
https://80000hours.org/2016/02/doing-good-through-for-profits-lincoln-quirk-and-wave/
My understanding is that this was the old focus of wave (The remittances part of the company is now rebranded Sendwave). IIUC, the current iteration of Wave is focused on making mobile money more popular.
That explains the mixing information I got!
It would be great to know more about their current expansion, and how do they approach countries that already have Mobile Money operators. I hope someone can clarify this, the website does not have much information.
Sorry for the minimalist website :) A couple clarifications:
We indeed split our businesses into Sendwave (international money transfer) and Wave (mobile money). Wave.com is the website for the latter.
The latter currently operates only in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire (stay tuned though).
In addition to charging no fees for deposits or withdrawals, we charge a flat 1% to send. All in, I believe we’re about 80% cheaper than Orange Money for typical transaction sizes.
We don’t provide services to Orange—if you saw the logo on the website it’s just because we let our customers use their Wave balance to purchase Orange airtime.
This is our goal as well; to quote myself in another comment:
Even Orange (which is fairly widespread in Senegal) has only gotten 25% of their own userbase onto mobile money (source) because they, like most mobile money systems, are executing really badly compared to what’s possible. There is a lot of room to make mobile money more accessible even in countries with already-existing mobile money. (Which at this point is nearly all countries AFAIK—it’s easy for a telecom to buy an off the shelf mobile money service from something like Ericsson or Huawei—much harder for them to actually execute well on rolling it out.)