Vodafone have perfected the skill of earning more from the humble text.
In October they benefited from some £ 375,000 of incremental revenue derived from commission payments based upon transferring an incredible £ 7.5m of micro payments by text, through their Kenya based M-Pesa innovation. In a country where relatively few people have bank accounts and the journey to the nearest bank can take hours, it has been little short of a revolution, allowing people in poor, rural areas to transfer money via a text. Already 1m customers from a total base of 7m have registered at Safaricom, Vodafone’s part-owned operation in Kenya.
Some users are texting money to themselves so they don’t have to carry cash on long journeys and Vodafone has even begun a trial with two companies to pay staff wages via text message. To put this into perspective, the mobile industry’s body, the GSM Association, sums up the financial opportunity for the sector. While 3 billion people worldwide have a mobile phone, only 1.8 billion have a credit or debit card. In addition, it believes that the value of cash sent home by migrant workers to developing countries could quadruple to £400 billion by 2012 if transfer by text message becomes the norm. Not insignificant! STUART