With
the splendid development of the Information Communication Technology nowadays,
the mobile phone has rapidly become an integral and essential part of our daily
lives. Statistics showed that in many countries, more than half the population
uses a mobile phone and, in some developing economies, mobiles are often people’s
only means of telecommunication and socialization.
It's
easy to notice that, influentially, mobile phones have fundamentally changed
how we communicate with each other and how we convey important information
instantly in society. Today’s mobile phones are more than just phones: they can
send multimedia information such as video clips, photos and music to almost any
corner of the world, store personal information, keep a schedule and more than
that. Mobile phones have become a ‘pocket partner’, which would somehow make us
feel sort of lost and disconnected when we are away from our phones. They have
become a dominant technology in the developed world. With innovation racing
ahead in the western countries, there is also the danger of developing
countries once again being left behind, this time technologically, what is
called ‘the digital divide’.
However,
the impact of mobile phones has possibly been more profound in developing countries
that have had poor telecommunications infrastructure. To some extent, mobiles
are ‘leapfrogging’ the technological gap between the developed and developing
world.
Let
me introduce the very initial idea for blogging the impact of mobile phones on finance.
One article caught my attention intensively the other day with the topic of somewhere
near the bottom of the pyramid, ICT in mobile devices have laid much influence
and impact on the way that people communicate, the lifestyle that people live,
and more importantly, the way that they earn a living. I got to know that some farmers
in remote villages of Kenya are using mobile phones to keep abreast of crop
prices; Rural fishermen in Sri Lanka pick out the best fishing spots with
satellite mapping of fish colonies. Moreover, migrant workers in countries such
as Sierra Leone, Kenya and South Africa no longer need intermediaries to
transfer money by means of mobile banking to relatives in remote villages. I
was so touched by these stories, to which I extraordinarily realized how
drastic impact have the mobile phones made to the whole world of new age, especially
to those countries and places, that tremendously needed information and
communication technologies for further development.
In
addition, considering the growth of mobile technology, including the usage and
spread, and taking into account its access to the financial services, mobile
financial services are regarded as an opportunity to reach a larger scale of
customers and as a new source of profits for mobile network operators.
In
the following weeks, this blog would cover several segments for the impact of
mobile phones in the retail financial services, including the mobile payment
methods used by banks, paypal, ebay, ICT in banking; Google's mobile-payment system,
called Google wallet; mobile money transfer and smart phone apps; and application
of Quick Response code on mobile phones,etc. Meanwhile, this blog would also deep
dive the driving force and influence of
ICT in the territory of financial services, and what insights we could have
learned out of it.
Let's
start the journey. Enjoy!
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