By Rebecca Ray, Senior Analyst, Common Sense Advisory
 
There is a very good reason why Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa are where the initial mobile payments services have been tested and launched; English is spoken in those countries.
 
If telcos, banks and other players really want to earn a substantial amount of revenue from mobile money services throughout Africa, India, and the rest of Asia, then they must face the language issue head-on. The sooner that language issues are addressed, the sooner that companies can start reaping the revenue benefits from mobile money.
 
Big business
A few recent factoids help to put this huge market opportunity in perspective. During his presentation at the Mobile World Congress in February, Ignacio Mas of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shared that Kenyans using M-Pesa conducted more transactions after 2.5 years than Western Union did globally!
 
According to one of the world’s largest handset makers, Ericsson, person-to-person money transfers will become one of the most used mobile applications in many countries over the next two to three years. Ercisson expects that market to reach around Euro 600 billion by 2015.
 
Juniper Research now estimates that Africa, APAC, and the Middle East will represent 84% of the total mobile money user base by 2013, with Africa and the Middle East accounting for the major part of that.
 
Making moves
The GSMA itself has two initiatives to support the growth of the mobile money sector; Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) and Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU). Both of these programmes will extend mobile money services to many more languages and cultures as the bridges are built between mobile money, the banks, and commerce, but only if they can communicate in a language familiar to them.
 
Connecting people and their money to other people and their money, along with commerce sites, is not enough. Once they’re connected, they must be able to communicate. Language in some form is what allows this.
 
To meet the linguistic challenge for mobile money, companies should focus on several areas. Language will be one of this industry’s biggest challenges. There are literally hundreds of languages to be considered throughout Africa and Asia. Literacy levels also vary greatly from one linguistic community to another, with many targeted customers being illiterate. This means that companies won’t get very far in Asia or Africa unless they address localisation issues, including language.
 
Also, translating just the opening screen is not enough. Our research has shown that if a website is not available in a person’s language, they are very likely to abandon it; the same applies to mobile applications (“Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: Why Language Matters on Global Websites,” September 2006, and “Can’t Pay, Won’t Buy: Global Payments” July 2008, Common Sense Advisory).
 
Operators will have to think in terms of the entire user experience, not just the opening screen. It may mean that they need to build applications that are specific for certain markets. They will certainly have to develop some technical terminology for many of the languages in this region.
 
And last, but certainly not least, they will need to deal with non-Latin scripts, meaning languages that are not written with Roman letters, as English is.
 
Ban retro-fitting
World-ready software is a question of architecture, not retro-fitting. To make this journey simpler and more cost efficient, operators will need to learn how to build world-ready applications that are based on internationalised software code (Common Sense Advisory, “’Hello, World’ as an Internationalization Wake-up Call,” April 2005).
 
Our data shows that the inclusion of internationalisation during the upfront design stage means that operators can avoid the extremely expensive task of reworking an English version for Bengali or Igbo, for example (Common Sense Advisory, “Global Product Localization,” June 2010).
 
The bottom line is, it’s pointless to offer mobile banking if you can’t reach people in their own language.