In a new article by Kelsey Piper on Vox, FAI’s Tim Ogden weighed in on the importance of mobile money in banking the unbanked in Kenya and the potential to spread Kenya’s model to its neighbors and around the world.
As Ogden notes, the success of Kenya’s mobile banking initiatives doesn’t mean the model can take hold everywhere:
““Kenya and China and Bangladesh [other countries that saw mobile money take off] are outliers, rather than normative,” Tim Ogden, director of the Financial Access Initiative at NYU, told me. Initially, he said, some people imagined that they could straightforwardly transfer Kenya’s success to every other country without bank account access. “The way we thought about this was we’d had no idea mobile money could do this, and it did it in these places, so it can do it everywhere, right?” But it’s not that simple.”
The article covers the launch of mobile banking in Kenya, details on how mobile banking actually works, its role in poverty alleviation, and more opinions on the barriers and opportunities to spread Kenya’s model globally. Read it here on Vox.