Jamaica a ready-made market for mobile money
Like other nations with a large unbanked population, the mobile money revolution may find a ready-made market in Jamaica. This is according to an article on Go Jamaica, a site that covers Jamaican news and business.
In a report commissioned by Solutions for Society, a think tank of the University of the West Indies, Texas Christian University economist Dr. Dawn Elliott found that only 12 percent of Jamaicans have bank accounts that allow them to transfer money or write checks. Additionally, nearly a third (33.7 percent) of Jamaicans have no bank account at all.
"Most Jamaican make payments using cash," said Dr. Elliott. What's more, reliance on cash means the unbanked are excluded from activities that would generate wealth.
"They are not borrowing from the banks, they are not investing, they are not building assets, they are not building wealth, and their businesses stay in a survival mode," Dr. Elliott said in the post.
Additonally, Dr. Elliot said that even though two-thirds of Jamaicans had depost accounts with FIs, those banks have largely failed the island by not using the money for borrowing or wealth-generating activities.
According to Dr. Maurice McNaughton, a director at the Centre of Excellence of the Mona School of Business, mobile financial services represent a tremendous opportunity for Jamaica's unbanked to achieve financial inclusion, and harnessing mobile devices to conduct transactions currently carried out in cash "has enourmous macroeconomic potential" for Jamaica.
For more information on this topic, visit the Mobile Banking research center.