I don't really know what is required to make mobile money a success. Kenya is in my opinion the most successful mobile money transfer country in the world. But it seems mobile money success is a chicken and egg situation. you need agents to assure customers and you need customers to assure agents. multiple countries even in africa are trying it and cannot seem to get hit the sweet spot as Safaricom did. Another country mobile money seems to be picking up in is Afghanistan (m-paisa).

@jaggernaut, you have a minor but very important fact wrong.

Your BBK mainly uses the mpesa interface to make transactions outside of the BBK system i.e. You transfer cash to mpesa then transact.

The British system links your account to a mobile no, and you can send cash to any other phone whose no is linked to a bank account. Hence to use the British system, you MUST have a bank account, something mpesa doesnt require.

The closest we have to the British plan is the Elma system, developed by Craft Silicon and is just in its nascent stage. Once all banks allow access for Elma, then you will be able to do inter bank transactions, effectively making cheques and RTGS obsolete.

a kenyan architect Mr Ikunu has come up with the mother of all mobile payments that will rival Mpesa completely :Tangaza http://www.tangaza321.com/tan/
He has already done KES 800m biz without any significant advertising and marketing.

Mpesa is a Vodacom project implemented successfully in Kenya. Most of the profits from Mpesa go directly to the mother company. Hence you can easily say mpesa is UK.

@ Muganda, only the one who first came up with the Mpesa idea can tell us its history. I remember reading about an mpesa look-alike way before the kenyan mpesa in asia. The notion that large institutions e.g World bank,DFID have sole custody of truth is slowly being eroded. I had a personal experience with World bank/IFC where i discussed with them an idea then suddenly the same idea was repeated in other countries including kenya, with them owning the rights to the commercial venture.