M Pesa vs Electroneum

With M Pesa already having established itself in Africa and beyond as serving the unbanked, how will Electroneum compete?

One thing of note is that M Pesa is owned by Vodafone. In my opinion, Electroneum would need to be competing against this giant in order to take market share.

The ultimate question though is, with a product that already exists that seems to be serving the unbanked in Africa, why would Electroneum be needed?

One reason I will give right now could be convenience. Currently unbanked people need to physically travel to an M Pesa agent, give them physical cash so the agent can transfer into funds electronically via sms to the persons account. Electroneum won’t need the user to travel anywhere as it will all be done electronically.

However that seems to be the only benefit I can see of electroneum over m Pesa. The downside of ETN being the ridiculous price volatility, which is a big issue.

Anyone have any other thoughts or ideas as to why ETN is better than m Pesa for the unbanked in Africa?

Cloud mining faucet - pay the part or whole of mobile bill, plus incentives from mobile operators. (earn/airtime)
Instant payment
Gig.guru / digital services (earn)
Training(earn)
Own bank via mobile app with or without interest/
Finance/microloans (borrow/finance business/consumption)
Direct mobile relationship (no middleman/agent)
Increased physical market trades (earn/spend)
Other retailer (spend)
Mobile phone set deals (free/low cost)
Exchanges (speculate/profit)

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ETN is also border-less. It doesn’t rely on one mobile carrier in a few countries.
M-Pesa is only used on Voda networks in Africa.

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Users will still have to go to agents and vendors to purchase additional ETN. Thats why Electroneum partnered with Xius which will give them access to 1.2 million agents in South America. The agent networks in Africa will come with partnerships with the MNO’s.

The Incentives and referrals.

Electroneums instant payment system will help MNO’s and MVNO’s to retain 25-30% of the cost lost in agent commissions

A partnership might be mutually beneficial and safaricom/Mpesa might want to use Electroneum’s licensed tech.

I seriously doubt Electroneum can compete with MPesa or any other widely used mobile money platform. The only way would be for all the big MNOs in Africa to partner and sign agreements to adopt Electroneum as their main digital currency.

Interesting to know why you are doubtful?

Since April we have learnt that Electroneum (at least for the time being) doesn’t need direct partnerships with the MNO’s as a third party OTC desks are mitigating the risk of volatility. Mpesas is tied to Safaricom and Electroneum is open to all MNO’s so there’s much more scope to scale.

Remember that Mpesa wasn’t particularly successful outside of Kenya and a handful of other African countries - their attempts to launch in other territories failed. The incentives provided by electroneum far outweigh those of Mpesa.

Let’s not forget that Mpesa doesn’t have an upcoming platform like AnyTask, which has the potential to be huge and increase the value of Electroneum - a finite supply.

Don’t you think that when the value significantly increases, those millions of users in developing countries won’t be shouting about it? When the Mpesa CEO doubled everyones balance over night in publicity stunt, it created viral growth.

Mpesa acquired 1 million users in the first year, and spent $10 million to create a network of agents. Electroneum acquired more users in the first year before even officially launching in specific regions and has yet to launch their ETN everywhere campaign and mass marketing. They have more than 10 million at their disposal to achieve this.

In my opinion, I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. It may take several years for the user numbers to ramp up exponentially, but I’m confident it will. Let’s also remember that Mpesa has had a 12 year head start, and is old tech with limitations.

There is every chance that a few years from now some of the big African MNO’s will have signed partnerships to accept ETN as their main currency. They are currently in talks with Governments, banks and corps, so this could well be in the works already.

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