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.)
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.)