Recent Developments in Mobile Banking and Payments

Abstract

This article will show mobile banking and payments are evolutionary, not revolutionary. They allow conventional intermediated payments to be used in more situations by more people. Admittedly they appear revolutionary in the sense that they open up the provision of banking services by non-banks. But this is likely to be a short-lived phenomena – as regulators catch up, these services will eventually be regulated as financial services (if not as banks). This article will discuss early evidence of this in such diverse places as the EU and Kenya. At its core is an element of the “inevitable” and “logical” convergence between the banking and communications industries.