T-Mobile Starts Its Own "M-Pesa" Service in the US

TechCrunch23 January 2014

T-Mobile (one of the major US mobile companies) today announced its intention to get into the business of providing banking services to its wireless customers, and any others who want an alternative to traditional banking accounts. The new platform will compete with, and also potentially boost, other, less-known mobile banking services, like those provided by a banking startup called Simple, for example, or Amex’s Serve.
It’s not a new idea for a mobile carrier to get into the bank-by-phone business like T-Mobile is now doing  - Kenya’s M-PESA, launched in 2007, is probably one of the best known examples of how successful such a tie-up can become. Today, there are nearly 20 million people around the world using M-PESA, which has since expanded from a basic mobile money transfer scheme, to include other loans and savings products, bill pay, salary disbursements, and more.

M-PESA, however, owes its leading position in the worldwide mobile banking business to a variety of factors, including not only its country of origin – a place where city workers regularly sent money back home to family in rural villages – but also because of fewer regulations, the backing of the country’s largest operator, Safaricom, and, as is often the case with new technologies, good timing. (Post-election violence in 2008 had Kenyans turning to M-PESA, which was regarded as safer than banks, The Economist explains).
In other words, what works in some parts of the world may not necessarily thrive in the U.S., and here, a carrier-backed mobile banking service is still something of a novelty. (Sprint prepaid subsidiary Boost Mobile launched something similar to T-Mobile’s last year, but has a smaller footprint)