

Is it a phone, is it a bank? - JumpCrisscross
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21574520-safaricom-widens-its-banking-services-payments-savings-and-loans-it

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dobbsbob
Sending money via SMS doesn't sound very secure. Lending to a phone you can
just throwaway, steal or clone doesn't sound very secure either. When do
Kenyan hackers fraud this service out of existence

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PotatoEngineer
Maybe the market is small enough, and the transactions small enough, that the
competent hackers are attacking other systems.

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i2pi
The market is large enough, the transactions are relatively large, too.

In Kenya, M-Pesa is by far, the #1 payments service, with nearly half the
country using it. It grew acceptance as a replacement for the other way of
remitting money from the cities to villages - busses. Prior to M-Pesa, bus
drivers would act, for a fee, as money carriers, bringing income back from the
cities to families back home.

The competent hackers were, literally, brute-forcing the old system. Bus
drivers are easier to compromise than mobile handsets and infrastructure.

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utunga
So much amazing innovation is driven from the valley but in this case it's
Kenya showing us the way. Why is that? Worth thinking about.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Because these are sectors not fully developed there. The existing institutions
here are hard to topple. But their equivalents perhaps don't fully exist
there, so there is a gap to fill.

