Mobile industry in Africa satisfying key consumer needs

While Western mobile companies scratch their heads about how to replicate or adapt the widespread adoption of mobile data services in Japan and Korea, Africa provides another example of how people respond to a great need not new technology. Currently WIZZIT Bank is providing a mobile banking initiative to fulfil the needs of the 14 million South Africans who have no proper access to banks or other financial services. Analysts estimate that up to 60% of the 22 million mobile phone owners would be without bank accounts or easy access to money transfer systems and that WIZZIT would provide these mobile consumers with a significant benefit in becoming economic citizens.

WIZZIT is essentially a new bank that provides its customers with the ability to carry out transfers, pay standing orders, top-up mobile phone credit and take out money. Security is via the usual four digit codes used by other banks and they have relationships with other banking chains allowing you to still do things the usual way. They already have what they call a “cult following” and have set up accounts for farmers to allow the mto send money home or to other family members much more easily.

This kind of banking operation has been made illegal in England and, looking at some of the details more carefully, it is clear that WIZZIT is, if anything, not a business model to follow in all its details, even if it suits the needs of its current target market. First of all, the bank carries out no credit checks, something obviously impossible for some of the citizens who have no credit to check. It takes only 2 minutes to set up an account and the service is also available to schoolchildren, which makes it universal and, to Western minds, inherently suspicious. Uniquely, WIZZIT has a policy to only employ unemployed people and uses them as salespeople to demonstrate and spread their knowledge of the service. You’d be hard pressed to find many people who could have faith in a bank in England or America who followed a similar policy.

It remains to be seen if this service can remain popular and secure but it fundamentally fulfils a glaring need for its customers. It is also just another example of how Africans in general are some of the highest users of WAP technology to access the internet, in particular using their mobiles to access world news sites such as the BBC. Poor fixed-line networks and the high cost of computers have made internet access far more more appealing on mobiles. Fast adoption of 3G Networks and the effciency of cellular network companies as opposed to the government-run telecoms companies have made WAP an internet standard in Nigeria and South Africa.

Again this model is unrepeatable in its details, given the high development and penetration of broadband in Western companies, whcih effectively raised the bar for mobile phones and cannibalised the potenital market. What is noticeable is that in both cases mobile phones have fulfilled needs otherwise uncatered for or under-provided through other media (Banking and News-provision respectively). It is this aspect of recognising useful gaps in the market that needs to be worked on by operators in developed economies, where data aservices are more likely to enhance or improve existing habits and behaviours rather than create new needs.

Once networks provide this kind of longed for service to their customers they are likely to see increased goodwill and loyalty that has previously eluded them. As an unlikely example of this relationship developing, witness the woman in Sierra Leone who named her new-born son “Celtel” after the local mobile operator that allowed her to contact a midwife in time to deliver her baby. Admittedly, this is unlikely to happen in Europe (“We’ve decided to call her “Orange”!”) but at least we can get to the stage where we don’t resent or ignore them.

Source- http://www.w2forum.com

Technorati : Africa, Cellular, Wireless
Ice Rocket : Africa, Cellular, Wireless