Mobile Money in developing markets : What should Mobile Money providers consider when trying to drive activity from the already registered user base?

Abstract: For the past decade, there has been many innovations made to the mobile phone and new features such as payments have been added to the mobile phone’s capabilities. East Africa is the region with the fastest uptake and highest adoption rates of mobile money in the world. Despite the success, the amount of active users of mobile money is still low in comparison to the number of registered users. The purpose of this master thesis is to analyze what mobile money providers should consider when trying to drive activity from the already registered user base. The main theoretical concept that was used is resource-based view and the analytical framework is an importance-effort matrix. The empirical study consisted of in-depth interviews with key experts and stakeholders from the mobile money industry. Most of the interviews were face-to-face interviews during a research trip to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The findings were then reviewed during the Mobile Money Africa 2014 conference in South Africa. This thesis has identified a number of reasons for low user activity of the registered user base together with strategies that has the potential to tackle them. In order to drive activity, it is important for the service provider to understand and consider what that is desired and required to possess in terms of tangible, intangible and human resources to be able to successfully implement and run the identified strategies. The study concludes that tangible resources (physical and financial resources) are of great important for enabling success of most of the identified strategies whereas intangible (intellectual property, reputation and culture) and human (skills and knowledge, communication and interaction, and motivation) resources have great variance of importance.