Why The World Should Be Following Africa’s Mobile Banking Example
Schalk Nolte, CEO Entersekt, looks at how African banks are responding to mobile security threats and points out that the rest of the world should be taking a page out of their book.
The growth of mobile banking has surged over the last two years. An October 2015 report from Juniper found that over a billion phone users would have used their device for banking by the end of last year, and expected this number to double by 2020. In fact, the uptake in emerging markets in particular required the company to revise its 2016 predictions to make allowance for the leap in users.
While international companies are certainly looking at the phenomenon and making sure that mobile forms part of their channel to market, many African companies are opting for a mobile-first approach, simply leapfrogging the traditional channel approach.
From a business perspective, banks understand the benefits of mobile banking and are actively driving its uptake. Mobile banking is ubiquitous, it’s self-service and low cost. Juniper has said that a mobile banking transaction costs a forty-third of what an in-branch transaction does, and we have heard some banks say that up to 60 percent of their operational costs go into providing for branch services.
What is interesting, though, is how African banks are placing security at the heart of their mobile strategy. They have good reason to do so. Security breaches threaten to build mistrust towards this innovative and low-cost channel, in turn slowing uptake and the ultimately impacting on the success of any mobile strategy.
