Branchless and Mobile Banking Solutions for the Poor: A Survey of the Literature

About 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to formal financial services, and yet one billion of them have a mobile phone. Branchless banking systems take advantage of increasingly ubiquitous real-time mobile communications networks to bring banking services into everyday retail stores, thereby alleviating the lack of banking infrastructure in the communities where poor people live and work. Most of these deployments are quite recent, hence there is a shortage of hard empirical evidence relating to them. However, one mobile banking scheme, MPESA in Kenya, has been phenomenally successful and has been a catalyst for much of the research done to date. In this article, we review the emerging literature on the definitions and model taxonomies employed in mobile banking; the status and drivers of global adoption of these schemes; the take-up and usage patterns of customers and their socioeconomic impact; and, finally, regulatory issues. Our objective is to help policymakers and practitioners in their continued efforts to create an enabling environment for branchless banking.