Mobile Money in Africa ~ Porteous on 3rd Gen...

The MIT Sloan Africa Business Club and the Finance Club just hosted a talk by David Porteous on “Mobile Money in Africa, towards the 3rd generation” Very interesting to hear of the many dimensions and surprisingly long history of mobile payments and enabled-commerce, starting with some early efforts, then taking off in a B2B fashion with CellPay in Zambia and more recently for P2P with m-Pesa in Kenya. What's exciting now are the emergent third generation of "enhanced phoneset" enabled solutions like MXit Moola out of South Africa and other players in the ASEAN region and beyond. Exciting times! Porteous himself founded and runs Bankable Frontier, a niche consulting firm based in Boston-metro specializing in three areas of financial service: technology and access, housing finance, and performance measurement for banks and institutions. And on a related note, check out guest post on WhiteAfrican by Ben Lyons of Kopo Kopo, and recently of FrontlineSMS:Credit on The Kenyan Mobile Money Ecosystem.