مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

In the Latin American and Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa regions, over 80 percent of the population has access to mobile phones while 39 and 24 percent of the population, respectively, has access to financial services such as payments, savings, and credit (Demirgüç-Kunt & Klapper, 2012). In these countries, “bank accounts are for the well off”, in spite of the fact that access to financial services are seen as a strategy for growth and development (CGAP, 2009, p. 13; Demirgüç-Kunt & Klapper, 2012). This is the promise of the technology known as mobile money or mobile payments.1 Mobile money services allow the mobile phone users to send a payment via a text message (SMS) to an individual or a business phone number. This technology promises to make financial services available to the “financially excluded” in the most economically disadvantaged regions of the world without the expense involved in the diffusion of traditional banking. Because of the greater diffusion of mobile phones compared to access to traditional banking, there are efforts to offer mobile money services to a mass public in all regions of the world.

After the some of the failures of the Washington consensus, contemporary development scholars began to emphasize financial development and poverty reduction as part of a strategy for equitable development driven by “modest reforms and experimentation” (Rodrik, 2006, p. 974; Williamson, 2000). Among the international organizations that promote financial inclusion, the G20 established a Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion and more than 100 financial regulatory institutions have adopted the Maya Declaration of 2011. The latter promotes financial inclusion and was drafted by the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, created in 1995 and housed at the Word Bank, has directed its efforts around the objective of financial inclusion, and the United Nations promotes access to financial services via the Secretary General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development (UNSGSA). A common theme in all of these efforts is financial inclusion via new communication technologies and specifically, via mobile phones, which have become the missing link for some development economists who see access to savings, payments and/or credit via these new technologies as a way to offer these services to “areas previously difficult to serve profitably” (CGAP, 2009, p. 13). Reflecting the importance of mobile payments as a strategy for financial inclusion, in 2014 the IMF began to report data on the number active mobile payments accounts in countries around the world (IMF Press Release, 2014).

While there have been important efforts to offer the services around the world, the diffusion has been uneven by country. In order to understand why the service has failed to diffuse in countries where the need is evident, this paper compares the cases Kenya and Mexico. These are both countries in which access to traditional financial services is relatively low, and mobile phone diffusion and “latent demand” for financial services is high, making them ideal markets for mobile money services. A review of the development of mobile payments in these two countries reveals that, while it has made important inroads, in Mexico the service has been significantly slower to take off, whereas in Kenya it has exploded at a dizzying rate. By way of comparison, two years after the national launch of the service in each country 22 percent of the population in Kenya used mobile payments and less than one percent did so in Mexico. Three years after the service was launched in each country, 40 percent of Kenyans were users compared to 2.2 percent of Mexicans (see Table 1). The difference in the diffusion of mobile money services is a function of the different regulatory paths taken by Kenya and Mexico, which are, in turn, a function of the level of regulatory capture by the banking industry. Regulatory capture sheds light on the extent to which existing regulated industries are able to fend off competitors via regulation they advocate for and even help formulate.