M-PESA usage Olga Morawczynski, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has spent more than a year investigating customer adoption and usage in both urban and rural Kenya, and has been sharing some of her insights on the CGAP blog. This time she talks about a third player, Sagentia, who was behind the M-PESA success:

“There was also a smaller player that had a vitally important role in the conceptualization and development of the application. That is, Sagentia, a technology consultancy firm based out of Cambridge. The firm not only wrote the software for M-PESA, they also designed the business processes, and provided operational and technical support during the pilot and after launch.” [...]

“They assured me that M-PESA was just the beginning. Using the mobile as a platform, they plan to create developmental services that penetrate other spheres —m-health, agribusiness. They further predicted that the mobile will soon begin to revolutionize these other spaces as well.”

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See also these earlier CGAP posts about her work (oldest posts listed first):

Morawczynski is the author of a forthcoming CGAP brief on M-PESA and recently co-authored Designing Mobile Money Services: Lessons from M-PESA with Ignacio Mas.