11 Mar Looking Into The Future Of African Online Payments: Are 500m “Unbanked” Africans Going to Leapfrog to Become The New “Bankless” Generation?
Are 500m “unbanked” actually going to leapfrog the world and become the “bankless”? Why bother becoming banked when you can be bankless? Already Africa has the benefit of mobile money which has completely transformed the financial landscape over the past 13 years since the inception of M-Pesa with the introduction of digital money. The banks struggle to keep up with this consumer movement as a result of legacy systems and costly infrastructure making it difficult to grow market share as a result of the marginal cost of customer acquisition, servicing and maintenance. Mobile money has completely dominated this unbanked African sector, and the card associations and banks are playing catchup. The fragmented nature of systems of banking (and lack of regional and international RTGS systems) and mobile money (straddled over 120 providers and disjointed jurisdictions) creates a wonderful opportunity for a new way of being. In the meantime we at African Payment Solutions are creating a “thin client” over all of these fragmented payment methods and jurisdictions to make life simple for our multinational merchants to simply and seamlessly get paid across banking, mobile money and digital currencies in Africa. But what about this hypothesis: Bingo! Does this mean the unbanked are now the bankless people of the future? Who will be the winners of the atomic disruption and transformation of this African payments space over time? Back to the present! If you are a multinational eCommerce company expanding to or across Africa, click here to get paid at the checkout with card and mobile money by more than half a billion Africans. Our African Payment Solutions services include: