ABSTRACT
Nick Hughes, a former Vodafone executive and a founding partner of Signal Point, had been until the Head of Global Payments at Vodafone, where he started M-PESA, the pioneering mobile money service rolled out in 2007 by Vodafone in partnership with its Safaricom subsidiary in Kenya. M-PESA—"M" for mobile, "Pesa" for cash in Swahili—is a simple service that allows registered users to transfer money from their mobile phone to another mobile phone user. While M-PESA users did not particularly trust the M-PESA agents, their trust in Safaricom and in the system sufficed to reassure users that confirmations received by SMS were a reliable check on fraud. Interestingly, the usage of M-PESA services was not confined to loan repayments. People could use some of the M-PESA float received from the microfinance institution to purchase Safaricom credit which they sent to relatives.
