Over on CGAP's Technology Blog, Olga Morawczynski, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, writes about Kenya's M-Pesa and what most of us don't know about M-Pesa. She credits much of its success not to the usual suspects we've heard about but rather to Sagentia, a technology consultancy firm based in Cambridge. As often happens with innovations, it was the small dedicated team working with the two big players that provided the focus to get things done!

In a story titled "M-Pesa success stirs banks’ fury as five million subscribers enroll", Washington Gikunju writes for Business Daily Africa about the success of mobile payments service M-Pesa in Kenya - saying that "Business Daily’s extensive interviews with M-Pesa users and commercial bankers has established that the system may slowly be evolving into Kenya’s biggest retail bank by all definitions —save for its official recognition as a basic money transfer service."

James Mbugua reports for the Nairobi Star that "four big local banks [in Kenya[ have formed an "ad hoc committee" to try and get M-PESA stopped." M-PESA, a mobile payments service offered by Safaricom, has been very successful - "The problem for the banks seems to be the extraordinary popularity of M-PESA. Launched in March 2007, it now has over 5,000,000 registered users and almost 5,000 registered outlets." [Editor's note: Hat tip to Dave Birch!]

Vodafone, Safaricom and Western Union have announced that they will partner to pilot a cross-border Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) service between the U.K. and Kenya. This service will enable customers to send cross-border remittances from select locations directly to Safaricom mobile subscribers in Kenya generally in minutes. READ MORE

Jack Ewing and Eliza Barclay writes for Business Week about the upcoming initial public offering of shares in Kenya's Safaricom - scheduled to begin trading on the Nairobi Stock Exchange on June 9th. Although not mentioned in the article, Safaricom is the home of M-PESA, perhaps the most successful person-to-person mobile payment scheme on the planet. (See more articles about M-PESA in the Payments News Archives.)

Al Hammond blogs on the NextBillion.net blog of the World Resources Institute about comments made at the recent Cairo conference on mobile banking and, in particular, the experience of M-PESA in Kenya. "The dominant use of M-PESA by Kibera residents is to transfer money home to their native rural villages, underscoring the importance of internal remittances in virtually all developing countries. ... M-PESA is competing successfully with more traditional means of remittances. Many users say the service is faster, safer-less chance of theft or "lost" money-and could be sent directly to their home village."

Wireless operator Orange is testing in the Ivory Coast a new money transfer system: Orange Money. Strategies Telecom & Media interviews Marc Rennard, executive director in charge of Orange’s operations in Africa, Middle-East and Asia. about Orange Money. As we've seen previously with M-PESA in Kenya, the mobile operators are focusing much of their mobile payments initiatives on markets where a large majority of the population is unbanked.

The afternoon session on day 2 of the Digital Money Forum was devoted to discussions about mobile payments. Samee Zafar from Edgar Dunn & Co. chaired the afternoon session and introduced Diane Coyle (who spoke on Mobile Money in Emerging Markets), Dirk-Jan de Haan (who spoke on experience from the Payter NFC trial in Rotterdam), and Guido Manglagalli from Visa EU who spoke about Visa's Mobile Platform and an NFC trial currently underway in London. READ MORE

Sarah Childress writes for the Wall St. Journal about Kenya's Safaricom - saying that 'first-time investors here are betting big on an initial public offering of [Safaricom] stock on the Nairobi Stock Exchange.' Dave Birch wrote about Safaricom's M-PESA mobile payments service over two years ago. Susie Lonie from Vodafone gave a presentation on M-PESA at the 2006 Digital Money Forum. Click for more M-PESA coverage.

In an article titled 'Money is going mobile through phone services', Cassell Bryan-Lowe reports for the Wall St. Journal about Safaricom, a joint venture between Vodafone and Telkom Kenya, that provides person-to-person remittance services in Kenya. According to the article, Vodafone is planning to add India as well as cross-border remittance services between Kenya and the UK.

The presentations from this year's Digital Money Forum held in London in late March are now available online - including via a convenient link to a zipped file (14.3 MB) with all of the speaker presentations in one download and another for all of the panelists.

Included is a very interesting presentation from the perspective of a major merchant looking at contactless technology titled What Do Retailers Want From The New Technology? (PDF) by Paul Chapman, Advanced Payments Manager at Tesco, and another on Mobile Financial Services for the Third World by Susie Lonie of Vodafone describing the M-Pesa mobile finance pilot in Kenya.