Setting up shop: Strategies for building effective merchant payment networks

This publication is part of a series of deeper insights into selected topics based on the findings of the 2013 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Financial Services. Sixty of the 98 mobile money providers surveyed offered merchant payments, with 28 planning to launch the product in the next 12 months. Merchant payments accounted for 1.6% of total transaction volumes and 4% of total transaction values in June 2013.1 To gain a better understanding of approaches to merchant acquisition and management, Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) conducted 12 interviews with mobile money deployments that have made significant strides in building a merchant network. The interviews covered mobile money services across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and East Asia and Pacific.