Africa, M-pesa & 2nd generation Bitcoin services. — What I Learned Today. When I first played with the mobile wallet, it seemed unreal to send money away for free. Yet Pelle Brandgaard had worked in Anguilla for years along with the most advanced “crypto-nerds” and knew well how use the power of digital currencies. His latest startup, Kipochi, is based in Nairobi, Kenya and uses Bitcoin’s potential to make this magic happen. Mobile money (the provision of financial services through a mobile device) has an amazing potential for the unbanked. As assessed by the World Bank, 2.5bn people don’t have a classical bank account but 2.5bn have access to a mobile phone. The overlap between both creates an amazing opportunity for 2bn of classical bank leftouts.
M-pesa as a billing system is the tree hiding the forest. M-pesa («M» for mobile, « pesa » for money in swahili) is the widely used mobile money system that was deployed by Safaricom (Vodafone’s subsidiary in Kenya) in 2005. Bitcoin unlocks low cost remittances. One Third of Kenyans Now Have a Bitcoin Wallet. M-PESA meets Bitcoin with new service in Kenya. Known as one of the most innovative — and to date, successful — mobile money programs in the world, Kenya's M-PESA is now dabbling in virtual currencies thanks to a new service called Kipochi.
According to an article on CIO, Kipochi is a new venture from Pelle Braendgaard and lets users of M-PESA buy bitcoins. Bitcoins can then be used for digital commerce or even to make cross border money transfers, something M-PESA users can't do now. Launched in 2007 by Safaricom and Vodafone, M-PESA operates in a number of sub-Sahara African countries as well as in Afghanistan and India. However, each M-PESA network is a separate entity in the country where it operates, and the networks aren't connected for cross border transfers.
Currently, M-PESA boasts more than 11 million users in Kenya where the unbanked rate is especially high, yet more than 80 percent of the country's 44 million citizens have a cellphone. Launches first Bitcoin wallet in Africa with M-Pesa integration - Kipochi Blog. Nairobi, July 1st, 2013 Kipochi Ltd has launched a groundbreaking solution that allows people to send/receive BitCoin and convert it to and from an M-Pesa balance.
This enables Kenyans to receive money transfers from the diaspora in an easier, faster and cheaper way, compared to using banks and money transferring services such as Western Union and MoneyGram. Kipochi is a light weight easy to use BitCoin Wallet that allows users to receive and send BitCoin all over the world. Even for people using simple low cost feature phones. Now with Kipochi, the remittances into Kenya has a faster and cheaper way to reach even the most remote areas in Kenya, villages with no banks or Western Union services – in an instant. Imagine a world where your dear grandmother in northern Kenya suddenly does not have to travel 1 day to reach a bank, only to find out transfer has not yet arrived. Kipochi works on all mobile phones, having SMS, USSD and HTML5 frontends, as well as a desktop computers.