Thursday, June 23, 2011

Physical mobile banking backwards step

Seeing that I have a lot of interest in mobile banking, I try and track what is happening as much as possible. I was therefore quite surprised when I learned of a new mobile banking service being launched in Uganda that I have never heard of before. The service launched by Centenary Bank and partially funded by US Aid aims to bring banking to 300 00 farmers in the northern part of Uganda. According to the article the project required investment of almost half a million dollars. (Read here).

It would be interesting to find out if they ever considered using mobile phones and deploying (much more cost effective) agent networks as has been proven to work in many deployments in the region. Just considering the status of some of the roads in the region, it would also be interesting to see the projected maintenance cost of the project.

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