MOBILE MONEY INFORMATION SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE FOR OPEN AIR MARKET

1
MOBILE MONEY INFORMATION SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
FOR OPEN AIR MARKET  

• Woldamriam Mesfin
• Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia,
  mesfinfw_at_gmail.com
• 4th IMTFI Conference
• (Dec 5-7, 2012)

2
Outline

• Introduction
• Related works
• - Mobile payment architectures
• 3. Methodology
• Data data collection
• 4. Findings
• 5. Conclusion
• 6. Next tasks

3
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)

4

• - 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)

5
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

6
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

7
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

8
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?

9
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

10
Market places studied

• Fruits vegetables
• Cereals
• Clothes
• Species
• Sheep goats, oxen and cows.

11
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

12
4. Findings
13
4.1. Currency identification through color,
size, and pictures on them
14
4.2. How Merchants Organize Themselves
15
(No Transcript)
16
(No Transcript)
17
4.3. Common mistakes errors merchants make
18
- 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),

19
Example of an old money that a customer refused
to accept
20

• 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)

21
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)

22
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)

23

• 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

24

• 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.

25
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

26
Price negotiations

• See the video
• Oral Vs Cash offers

27
5. Conclusion

• Potential architectural design concepts are
  identified.
• Further research insight is required regarding
  the formats (structure) of digital currencies

28
6. Next tasks

• Some more field study (different contexts)
• To identify some more design concepts
• Map those concepts into architectural design

29

• Thank you
• Questions
• Suggestions, and
• Comments are welcome
• mesfinfw_at_gmail.com