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) 1 Outline 1. Introduction 2. Related works - Mobile payment architectures 3. Methodology Data & data collection 4. Findings 5. Conclusion 6. Next tasks 2 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) 3 - 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) 4 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 5 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 6 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 7 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? 8 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: 9 Market places studied • • • • • Fruits & vegetables Cereals Clothes Species Sheep & goats, oxen and cows. 10 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 11 4. Findings 12 4.1. Currency identification through color, size, and pictures on them 13 4.2. How Merchants Organize Themselves 14 15 16 4.3. Common mistakes & errors merchants make 17 - 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), 18 Example of an old money that a customer refused to accept 19 • • • • 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) 20 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) 21 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) 22 • 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 23 • 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. 24 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 25 Price negotiations • See the video Oral Vs Cash offers 26 5. Conclusion • Potential architectural design concepts are identified. • Further research insight is required regarding the formats (structure) of digital currencies 27 6. Next tasks • Some more field study (different contexts) – To identify some more design concepts • Map those concepts into architectural design 28 Thank you Questions Suggestions, and Comments are welcome mesfinfw@gmail.com 29