By Telecom Lead Team: Mobile services provider Telenor is
planning to achieve 10 percent of its revenue in Asia from mobile financial
services in the near term.
I’m convinced we’ll get there,” said Telenor EVP Kristin
Skogen Lund during her keynote speech at Mobile World Congress.
but is driving revenue and reducing churn at Telenor.
launched in Pakistan together with Tameer Micro Finance Bank in 2009, is the
operator’s flagship mobile financial service and is seeing double-digit growth
month on month. Last year, more than 30 million Easypaisa transactions took
place, involving a transaction volume of $700 million, according to a report in mobilebusinessbriefing.com.
Though Telenor has been able to buy Tameer, the
regulatory aspect will vary considerably country by country.
we know we will have to sort this out in different ways. In some countries we are
not allowed to own a bank,” Skogen Lund added.
Operators have a phenomenal opportunity to provide
banking services to the unbanked: in Pakistan, around 85 percent of the adult
population do not have access to basic financial services such as micro loans.
Now, Telenor has around 17,000-18,000 Easypaisa outlets
in the country, compared to just 9,000 banking outlets.
Skogen Lund added that the simple structure of the
service also means the operator can operate its service at about 5 percent of
what a bank can do.
Easypaisa resellers are open at all hours of the day, unlike banks. Recognizing
the social-economic benefits of such a service, the Melinda and Bill Gates
Foundation also provided a grant of $6.5 million last year to extend it to
rural communities.
services, including the Tap2pay NFC trial in Norway and the mobile wallet joint
ventures in Sweden and Denmark.
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