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MiMoney – Credit where it’s due

Published by on Dec 4th, 2009, 1 Comment

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In South Africa, the credit for the development of the certain new services on the mobile platform goes to ordinary people in the lower income brackets who have led the way by adopting, even instigating new ideas to turn the cellphone into a powerful transacting tool.

Compared to a low eight percent fixed internet penetration, South Africa has cellular penetration of a 114 percent. It is clear from the statistics that South Africans have leapfrogged fixed-line telephony and internet in favor of mobile telephony and have called for an increasing array of data services to be delivered to this platform.

This is patently true when it comes to banking and transacting using the mobile phone. To the surprise of the airtime providers, the African continent has witnessed the use of multinational pre-loaded airtime (most notably MTN airtime vouchers) as a type of cross-border grassroots currency, swapped and bartered via sms, and a way to send “money” quickly back to family in other African countries. The informal airtime-economy is an excellent example of the organic development of technology by ordinary people to meet their transactional needs in contexts where credit cards and banking facilities are lacking.

Meet MiMoney

mimoney works essentially like preloaded airtime, or, in other words, converts cash into an electronic currency that can be used to make purchases in a secure and controllable manner. The currency is free to buy, free to get and free to keep, so a R100 note converts into exactly R100 mimoney to be used online, with no leakage or transaction fees incurred. (more…)

http://www.bandwidthblog.com/wp-content/themes/cnnetwork