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Comment by geekpowa | Hacker News Reader

G-Cash, in the Philippines, was the first mobile based money transfer platform. It was launched in October 2004, a year before M-Pesa.

There have been many attempts to replicate M-Pesa's extraordinary success. M-Pesa in Kenya is a significant outlier in the mobile money space.

[Edit: assumed M-Pesa founding date of 2007 in wikipedia was when M-Pesa launched. It actually launched pilot in Oct 2005. Exactly one year after Philippines system]

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There's a lot of other *Pesa systems in East Africa and they all are relatively successful: TigoPesa, HaloPesa, AirPesa, etc etc. Everyone talks about M-Pesa because it was first in East Africa but at this point, it's a commodity.

One thing that has always impressed me about these systems: I've never read a story about a corrupt manager of the deposited funds betting them on the stock market and losing them. That's something we in The States have had a hard time preventing and worked hard to legislate against. And still, in a very rough parallel, we utterly failed at it during the housing bubble.

So if my conception of the situation even makes sense, how have M-Pessa and equivalents avoided this pitfall?

They haven’t. I just got my 10gb package stolen by voda today. The company is dishonest and no one around here trusts them. People might get money through M-pesa, but they convert it into cash asap.

It which case the answer to "Is M-Pesa Kenyan or British" is really to ask "What makes M-Pesa special, and is that Kenyan or British?"

Do you happen to know anything about what makes M-Pesa such an outlier?

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