State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Mobile banking has undoubtedly taken the lead with the collaborative mobile banking model, where collaboration takes place between the carriers and the banks who can distribute the roles of the value chain amongst themselves. An example of this is ‘easypaisa‘ from Telenor Pakistan and Tameer Bank.

The fast changing dynamics will soon take the Mobile banking to new levels. Before coming to the topic, lets take a look at this Stakeholder Impact Diagram from the Mobey Forum.

This figure clearly indicate that they principal stakeholder of the mobile financial services (MFS) is the ‘customer’, with MNOs, banks and merchants playing the key role to provide MFS.

In Pakistani market, so far we have seen mobile bill payments and mobile money transfer (domestic) playing in action and attracting the consumers.

Exploring on more customer demands from MFS I came across a study report from Innovar, a financial service consultancy. The report reveals the following observations as obtained from survey involving more than 7000 consumers to aid MFS developments.

1. Consumers are most likely to use mobile financial services for six categories:
   • purchase of perishables
   • bill payments
   • unmanned vending payments
   • purchases on internet
   • pre-paid top up
   • person-to-person payments (money transfer)
2. Consumers see mobile payments is more suitable for remote payments than face-to-face retail payments
3. Consumers prefer to use credit, as a from of payment method for mobile payments
4. Consumers aged 20-40 appear to be most receptive to the mobile payment services
5. Consumers prefer to use existing handsets for mobile payments
6. Registration processes and user interface need to be simplified in order to encourage greater consumer adoption

The observations marked in red are what I see as the potential big things mobile banking in Pakistan could take up. I leave it for comments here.