Page 295 - The Digital Financial Services (DFS) Ecosystem

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Ecosystem

Mobile-based solutions

Most postal operators having current or savings accounts are now trying to come up with a strategy to make
their services available to their clients via mobile phones. Here again, there is a lot of potential for DFS support
services to develop partnerships with Posts.

One example of such an alliance emerged in 2015, in Senegal, when the Post joined forces with a start-up called
Numherit to launch a service which is available through various channels. All clients get a current account at the
Post, which is linked to a Visa card and an e-wallet account, accessible both on feature phones and smartphones.
The Post, which handles a number of social transfers on behalf of the government, transferred these cash
payments onto the new platform, with 200,000 people benefitting from the system only 3 months after the
launch. The interesting point with this alliance is that both organizations are involved in the development of
the service, with a special focus being placed on the development of the merchant ecosystem. Retail shops,
drugstores, restaurants, gas stations, are all actively targeted to ensure mobile and card payments acceptance.
The growth of the service will be interesting to monitor in 2016. In particular, at the moment, the mobile
service is only made available to new clients. People who already have an account at Postfinances do not get
automatic access to the new system. Ensuring an adequate repartition of both responsibilities and revenues
in the venture will go a long way in determining the long-term success of the partnership.

Similar partnerships are already in discussions in various West and Central African countries where the Posts
owns accounts, such as Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, or Cameroon.

One major challenge for postal operators under BM4 to further develop as DFS providers is that in a number
of cases, they are not connected to the national payments infrastructure. More than half of postal operators
which offer their own accounts are in that case, which means they have to operate in closed loops or to access
national payment system and/or banking switches through partners. As a consequence, their clients can’t
benefit from all the advantages of DFS like transferring their monies to banks or withdrawing money from
other financial institutions’ ATMs. This challenge of integration into the “normal” bank infrastructure is one
of the main issues to tackle for Posts who want to move forward in the digitization of their financial services.

4.5 BM5: Full-fledged postal bank

There are currently 13 postal operators worldwide that can be classified as postal banks, i.e., a designated
postal operator offering account-based services under a banking licence. All of them have a core banking
system and offer their services in a fully digital format.

Depending on the national context, the Posts in this group have developed various digital strategies.
Mobile-based strategies

The Postal banks of Gabon or Morocco are both trying to increase their offering through mobile channels. Their
strategies are quite similar: the Post builds or buys its own platform and uses MNOs only as communication
pipelines. This gives the Post more independence in product development/management as well as the
opportunity to digitize their own postal financial products (including savings/current accounts). However, the
Post needs to invest more resources and to have good capacities in the following areas: IT, marketing, product
development, agent management and risk management.

Al Barid Bank (ABB), the postal bank of Morocco, is a good example of this model. ABB provides banking
services to 6 million clients. All 1,800 post offices in the country are interconnected and all services are
performed electronically. In mid-2014, ABB launched a suite of mobile banking services which is available
on both smartphones and feature phones. To do so, ABB has not concluded any partnership with the mobile
network operators as mobile networks are only considered a channel to carry data. As of end of 2015, ABB
had 150’000 clients registered on its mobile service, 75% of which were active. In terms of financial inclusion
impact, it should be underlined that 42% of mobile clients are new clients which were previously unbanked.
After less than two years of operation, the results are still modest but ABB’s management is confident they
will improve gradually.

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