Digital Payment Systems

Christine Yee with Darpan Bohara and Yashna Sureka of Smith College in the U.S. will develop a fingerprint scanner that can link to phone networks and banks to enable merchants to easily and quickly accept mobile money payments in India. Fingerprint identification is relatively secure and will simplify the payment process so people with different levels of literacy can use it.

Curtis Vanderpuije, Kodjo Hesse and team from expressPay Ghana Ltd. in Ghana will develop a low-cost, contactless device for merchants in developing countries to more easily accept and process mobile money transactions. They will design the device so it can read identifying information from merchants and customers using radio-frequency identification, and use unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) to communicate with existing mobile money providers.

Lynne Thomson of TNS Global Research in the U.S. will use SMS to track digital and non-digital financial transactions in near real time to inform development agendas and boost uptake. Digital financial services help the poor lift themselves out of poverty, but measuring uptake is currently slow and expensive. SMS is widely used throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, and they will perform a proof-of-concept study in Kenya using SMS to send short surveys to a group of users to extract basic information on their recent financial transactions, such as type, date, and amount.

Twahirwa Merab of PIVOT ACCESS Ltd. in Rwanda will improve access to credit for poor individuals in Rwanda by developing a credit scoring system so that digital financial service providers can better estimate risk. Their system will integrate data from a range of financial transactions such as utility bill payments and mobile phone top-up frequencies to produce a formal credit history for each individual. They will perform a pilot test involving a Rwandan mobile network operator and bank to assess the feasibility of their system and use the results to refine it.