Mobile money services stay hot in Sierra Leone

Within a year of its introduction to the Sierra Leone market and with only two service providers in operation -- Splash Mobile Money and Zain -- mobile money is already being touted as the payment option of choice in the country.

Based on figures released by the two operators recently, SplashMoney, which started operations in September 2009, has 25,000 users, and Zain's Zap service, which launched in January, has close to 50,000.

However, these figures are likely to improve very soon. Splash Director Sheka Forna said that the company's Kenyan experience has shown the many uses of mobile money and the appetite of the public for such services. SplashMoney is focusing on several initiatives to achieve and encourage greater use of mobile means of payment.

"We are in the process of launching a variety of new services that will increase its attraction and practicality," Forna said. "We are talking with employers about using Splash to pay workers, to businesses such as utility companies about bill payment, to mobile operators about using Splash to buy top-up, and to retailers about using Splash to buy goods and services over the counter. We also hope to be able to offer international remittance."

SplashMoney is a platform-neutral service accessible to customers of the three major telcos -- Africell, Comium and Zain -- with a total of more than a million users, allowing the movement of money between customers of disparate networks. On its part, Zap is a proprietary application that restricts customers to transacting only within the Zain brand.

Zain SL Commercial Director Keith Tukei noted that mobile money is poised to change the face of banking, offering a complete ecosystem and enabling services such as money transfer from one person to another, from bank account to phone and vice versa, and for payment for goods and services.

"With the next phase of cross-border transfer, mobile money will be entrenched in the daily lives of all our people in Sierra Leone. In countries where this service is active, i.e. Kenya, Uganda Tanzania, the World Bank has estimated that mobile money has had an upward average impact on GDP of 0.75 percent," Tukei said.

"Hence, our role at Zain will be to continue sensitization of not only the benefits but also the safety aspects as Zap complies with the highest standards of the central bank in this country," he said.

Sierra Leone has about 6 million people, but only an estimated 250,000 own bank accounts. Mobile money is expected to rise as a result of use by people who do not have the qualifying criteria to open bank accounts or had been prevented from doing so as a result of illiteracy.