Haiti Mobile Money: A Point-in-Time Case Study

The study describes the mobile money ecosystem of service providers, technology providers, agents, vendors, consumers and regulators, and the two services launched after the earthquake: TchoTcho Mobile (Digicel and Scotiabank) in late November 2010 and T-Cash (Voila and Unibank) in early December 2010. It organizes the market's development into launch and grow, sustain, and evolve stages, and reports early survey evidence from the University of California, Irvine on who signs up and why others do not. The Haiti Mobile Money Initiative included a US $10 million prize and a USAID-funded team, HIFIVE, that acts as a broker between consumers, regulators and service providers.

The study finds that growth in transactions was quick but that services remained limited to cash in, cash out and person-to-person transfers, with bank integration, bill payment and merchant payments still being developed. It points to a transaction limit of US $250 in Haiti, conservative compared with other markets, and to the weight of non-governmental organizations, which account for a large share of the world's cash deployment programs on a mobile money platform. It also discusses how the prize money, estimated at 30 to 50 percent of typical launch costs in other markets, should shape further donor support.