Text me the Money!

Yes, exchanging money is now as easy as exchanging SMS, using your mobile phone.

In underdeveloped countries, the mobile phone penetration has far out-dueled those of traditional banking means such as bank branches and ATMs.  So then, leveraging this penetration makes an absolute sense to deliver financial services, doesn't it?

Think about a service that allows you to conveniently send and receive money from anywhere to anywhere, that too, in a point to point fashion which does not require either the sender or the recipient to travel in order to complete the transaction.  In underdeveloped countries, this means, someone does not have to travel by bus for 8 hours to deliver money to family.  It means that an elderly woman no longer has to walk for five hours to a remittance agency to withdraw the funds that her son has just sent her.  It also means parents can pay for their children's education fees directly from their mobile phones, regardless of whether the children study in a school next door, or next city.

Hey, you could even lend a quick buck or two to your buddies.  If SMS is now the language amongst the youth, then why not use it more!

No credit for credit cards - First of all, to have a credit card, one needs to have a bank account, which is a privilege for many in poor countries.  Who needs a bank account and a credit card, when one can pay for merchant expenses easily with a mobile phone?  Why carry cash and be vulnerable to insecurities?

Banking with mobile phones is a paradigm shift from the traditional ways of delivering financial services.  In underdeveloped countries, this type of service has the potential to revolutionize not just the banking sector, but the entire economy.  Let the underdeveloped countries have at least one competitive advantage over the developed ones - let this service provide it to them.

-SP