A Fictitious ROI Chart

We’re commonly hired to help companies make decisions on their mobile roadmap and build the business case around the mobile initiatives.

Many execs put items on their roadmap that their gut tells them are important, but it’s difficult to calculate the ROI.

While I agree that it’s impossible to calculate the exact ROI of soft ROI initiatives, I think you can calculate the ROI enough to objectively assess your priorities.

In fact, I think it’s critical that you do so. The mobile landscape is littered with too much wasted money because of executive gut decisions that didn’t end up the way they expected.

So, let’s walk through an example:

I’m going to use mobile banking because I think it’s actually harder to calculate than retail mobile commerce in some ways. Retail mobile commerce ultimately results in a sale, whereas banking is a loyalty play. Retail is tricky to calculate because increasingly, the sale crosses channels, hiding the fact that mobile, online, or bricks-and-mortar retail affected the sale.

So, imagine a mobile banking roadmap with ten items on it but you only have budget to do five or six.

The number one item on your roadmap is some cool new feature, like Remote Deposit ...

Today the mobile money for the unbanked programme is releasing the results of the 2011 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey. The survey is, we believe, the most comprehensive attempt to measure the extent of customer adoption of mobile money for the unbanked ever undertaken. In exchange for a guarantee of confidentiality and access to customized benchmarking reports, 52 operators and other service providers from 35 countries provided MMU with detailed operational data about their deployments, including the number of registered and active customers. The full report is now available for download, and over the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing some of the main findings of this survey. Today, we look at the total number of mobile money customer—registered and active—around the world.

The service providers in our sample reported having 60 million customers as of June 2011, a number which excludes customers who transact “over the counter” without having registered. Eleven services reported having more ...

"Everything takes longer than you think and then it's suddenly been there all along" That is my pitch on mobile payments in a nutshell and is always followed by the question "Will YOU be ready?" That said some things DO come faster than you think.
The convergence of low cost smartphone and mobile payments has arrived. G-Cash in the Philippines, a mobile payment service targeting the unbanked the last 6-7 years, has launched an Android app. Just a short (4 years) time ago you had to register and transact on the service via '/' delimited SMS messages in a specified format. It was a user experience nightmare that few could get correct without assistance. It was the assumed necessary evil as the masses, we were told, only had access to SMS or USSD.
Step change is occurring rapidly behind the scenes.


Feature phones are disappearing in urban areas and being replaced by Chinese, Indonesian, and Indian low cost android or blackberry handsets. Data is the new killer app as it drives secondary commerce opportunities. Data is certain to slowly become as or more ...

During my time with a nascent mobile money venture I was always frustrated at how difficult we found it to work with small businesses. It is not something we suffered from exclusively; I see it when I look at the large number of mobile money operators out there.
Much effort is put into enabling large utility bill payments as a way of attracting customers and driving transaction volume. These efforts, undoubtedly important, are often pursued at the expense of enabling payments for smaller businesses. I argue that both are essential and should be pursued in parallel.
Let me give you an example. Soon after launch, small businesses were clamouring to meet with us and work out how they could use our product to collect payments. We had small billers, restaurants, and delivery companies all keen to meet with us. They seemed to instinctively grasp the opportunities our product presented before individual customers did. In addition, their needs were broadly the same.
One of the businesses that came to us was a gaming company, which ran a Massively Multi player Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). Their biggest problem was distribution. Their customers, ...

TGI Fridays app now does mobile payments

With the annual NACHA payments conference happening this week in Baltimore, mobile payments is top of mind for a lot of folks.

I’m sure there’ll be plenty of panel discussions about when mobile payments will be mainstream. There will also be lots of debate over who will control mobile payments. Carriers, bankers, payment technology companies and others have been bickering over mobile payments for nearly a decade now – and there are few mainstream results.

I think we have forgotten the customer.

If  we make shopping easier with mobile payments, it’ll eventually happen and lots of players in the ecosystem will make money.

Tapping a phone isn’t much easier than swiping a card. In the beginning customers will still have to carry their wallet everywhere. I think they will be underwhelmed.

Scanning a barcode is easier to implement, but it’s harder for both the customer and the cashier. However, it  does work well in certain circumstances. The Starbucks application is a great example. It’s something people do habitually, and they don’t have to carry their Starbucks card. They can’t ditch their wallet, but they do make it one card thinner ...

Two recent announcements prove that retailers are very much in the mobile payments game. First, The Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart and Target were among two dozen retailers collaborating on a mobile commerce project. Then, Starbucks shared the impressive numbers from its Starbucks Mobile app, which launched in the U.S. in January 2011, and the UK and Canada a year later. 42 million: that’s how many transactions the company has processed in the 15 months since it launched, and 16 million of those happened between December and April.

Retailers aren’t waiting for NFC, or for banks or Google Wallet—or permission. They’re getting ahead and launching their own systems. And why not? They’re seizing the opportunity to take control of the customer relationship, which they already own, in a new channel.

The Starbucks Mobile app is a great example of what it takes to succeed with mobile commerce and mobile CRM. It’s not fancy or complicated. It’s simply a digital version of the coffee giant’s existing loyalty card, already popular with millions of customers. Load funds to the mobile app starting with a prepaid card and then a credit card, bring your phone to any Starbucks in the U.S., UK or Canada ...

"Everything takes longer than you think and then it's suddenly been there all along" That is my pitch on mobile payments in a nutshell and is always followed by the question "Will YOU be ready?" That said some things DO come faster than you think.


The convergence of low cost smartphone and mobile payments has arrived. G-Cash in the Philippines, a mobile payment service targeting the unbanked the last 6-7 years, has launched an Android app. Just a short (4 years) time ago you had to register and transact on the service via '/' delimited SMS messages in a specified format. It was a user experience nightmare that few could get correct without assistance. It was the assumed necessary evil as the masses, we were told, only had access to SMS or USSD.

Step change is occurring rapidly behind the scenes.

Feature phones are disappearing in urban areas and being replaced by Chinese, Indonesian, and Indian low cost android or blackberry handsets. Data is the new killer app as it drives secondary commerce opportunities. Data is certain to slowly become as or more important than network airtime. The evidence is Telcos selling network ...

Wealth Management and Private Banking are high priorities in 2012

Mobile banking and mobile commerce are now table stakes in North America.

Most institutions have at least a placeholder offering for the now majority of customers with smartphones and tablets. Retail banking, retail mobile commerce, brokerages, and P&C insurance companies all have strong mobile offerings in market.

Mobile for wealth management and insurance agents are a huge trend we’re seeing across the U.S. and Canada. However, as with early mobile banking, the first efforts tend to be timid. It’s only a matter of time before bolder offerings arrive.

Early wealth offerings focus primarily on research with some limited portfolio capabilities. Citi Private Bank, for example, is primarily for reviewing research. Bank of America Merrill Lynch offers self-directed clients a larger variety of tools.

It seems everyone is targeting the iPad almost exclusively. However, private banking executives report pressure to support a wider variety of devices that ultra high net worth clients demand – not for themselves – but for attorneys or accountants that work for them. Clearly the iPad is ...

This is the third post in a series on remittances. Stefan Staschen works regularly as a consultant for CGAP’s Government and Policy Team and is an Associate with Bankable Frontier Associates. 

Tajik migrants, courtesy of Stefan Staschen

My colleague Olga Tomilova and I recently were in Tajikistan and Russia to learn more about the large remittance flows between these two countries. We were most interested in the potential to link remittances with other financial products, such as loans and savings accounts in order to increase access to finance on both ends of the remittance corridor.

 

Having lived and worked in Kenya for many years, I inevitably started comparing Tajikistan with Kenya, and I realized that this is actually quite an interesting comparison.

For example, taking one point of comparison, in Kenya there is a lot of talk about the high aid-dependence of the economy (5.7% of GDP). But it turns out that it is still small in comparison to the “remittance-dependence” of Tajikistan, which peaked at 50% of GDP in 2008 (i.e. just before the effects of the global financial crisis could be felt) and stood at 40% ...