MOBILE MONEY INFORMATION SYSTEM
ARCHITECTURE FOR OPEN AIR MARKET
Woldamriam Mesfin
Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia,
mesfinfw@gmail.com
4th IMTFI Conference
(Dec 5-7, 2012)
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Outline
1. Introduction
2. Related works
- Mobile payment architectures
3. Methodology
Data & data collection
4. Findings
5. Conclusion
6. Next tasks
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1. Introduction
The Situation
- Financial service problem & development of
mobile technologies
- Individuals linking their money practice to
mobile phones (Maurer 2010, Kristof 2010)
- Development of ubiquitous technology
- Societies are becoming cashless
(Garcia-Swartz, Hahn, and Layne-Farrar, 2006)
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- Dictate money gradually becomes less material
(Kristof, 2010); (Muhammad 2011); (OECD 2002),
(http://futureofmoney.com)
- The need for personal IS to manage everyday
money practice arise, (Olsen, Hedman, and
Vatrapu, 2012).
But no such frameworks so far
(Krogstie et al.; 2004), (Jones and Marseden,
2006), (Parikh, 2007)
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2. Related works
• Many attempts to address the issue of financial
services through:
– ATM and agent networks
Problems
- ATM not suitable for sparsely populated rural
people, requires electricity
- Agent networks: have liquidity problem
(http://www1.ifc.org) and, requires
ubiquitous telecom SMS infrastructure
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Current mobile payment architectures
- Requires merchants and customers to have
bank accounts, (Kumar et al.; 2010), (Vilamos
and Karnouskos, 2003), (Britto et al.; 2008),
(Guo, 2008) and (Chandrahas et al.; 2011)
- Developed in the context of developed
countries
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Bottlenecks in developing countries
• Low practice and service of bank account based
transaction, (Abhijit and Esther, 2007), (Rutherford,
1999), (Duncome and Boateng, 2009), ( Kristof ,
2010), (Collins et al, 2009).
• Frequent interruption of telecom services, (no
signals and services at underground buildings,
during national and religious holidays (network
congestions), which make SMS based payments to
be impractical.
• SMS based payment architecture is also not
appropriate for micro payments, (Guo, 2008).
Imagine 35 cent SMS service charge to pay 50 cent
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Research Question
• Thus, it is important to research and look for
USER CENTERED ARCHITECTURE
• If money is digital (mobile money), what has
to be the characteristic nature of mobile
money information system architecture
(functionalities) in the context of illiterate rural
communities who transact in the open air
market?
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3. Methodology
• 65 million Ethiopians live in rural areas
• They transact in open air market
• Data is collected from 4 different sites from
September – November 2012
• Observation, interview, and discussions were
used to gather the data
• Different market segments were considered
like:
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Market places studied
•
•
•
•
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Fruits & vegetables
Cereals
Clothes
Species
Sheep & goats, oxen and cows.
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Respondent Profiles
(through random selection)
•
•
•
•
Different religions
Different age (16-95) years old
Different educational level (0 grade – BA)
Business experience (0.5 – 30 )years
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4. Findings
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4.1. Currency identification through
color, size, and pictures on them
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4.2. How Merchants Organize Themselves
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4.3. Common mistakes & errors merchants make
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- No queuing of customers
- Items are not prepackaged
Thus during busy times:
• Merchants are not sure who has paid them
and who did not,
• How much money was received and whether
changes were made or not,
• Put sales of an item into the wrong bag
• Customers are not willing to accept old money
(for change),
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Example of an old money that a
customer refused to accept
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•
•
•
•
Cash can get lost by wind
Money can stick together and be counted as one
Forgery money notes and unable to differentiate
Lack of changes (during transaction)
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How they solve some of these problems?
• Disagreements between merchants and
customers regarding how much was accepted,
whether changes were made or not is
resolved by asking people around,
• Back tracing (confessing how much they have
when they are coming)
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4.4. Feature of automated tools that
merchants would like to have, if any
A device that is capable of:
• Protect their money from thefts,
• To handle money easily,
• Able to identify the profit & lose from each
item categories, identify cheaters,
• That can tell balance by sound,
• Do financial mathematics (sales, costs, profit
& lose, changes)
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• A device that able to tell when making mistakes,
can be integrated with mobile phones for
alerting purpose,
• A device that is capable of counting money
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• Cheap, durable, easy to carry on, and operates
by sound,
• Able to generate changes for transaction,
• That can detect people who has not paid, how
much they paid, and detect cheaters,
• Able to detect errors and mistakes through
sound,
• That cannot be stolen, even if stolen, money
should be inaccessible to thefts and send signal
about its location to their cell phone.
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Practices and problems of market assignments
(buyers perspective)
• Delegating one another
– Illiterates keep separately, even the changes
– Relatively educated people keep a note of it
and aggregate with their personal money
• Appears to be lump sum of money and
attracts thefts and burglars
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Price negotiations
• See the video
Oral Vs Cash offers
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5. Conclusion
• Potential architectural design concepts are
identified.
• Further research insight is required regarding
the formats (structure) of digital currencies
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6. Next tasks
• Some more field study (different contexts)
– To identify some more design concepts
• Map those concepts into architectural design
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Thank you
Questions
Suggestions, and
Comments are welcome
mesfinfw@gmail.com
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