Mobile Money: Towards Understanding How Spending Patterns in Emerging Economies Can Inform on Consumer Behavior

摘要

Understanding how people manage and spend their money is self-evidently important to the practice of marketing. Mobile payment is gradually becoming accepted in developed economies however it has been the norm in many emerging economies for some time. In this sense, these economies are ahead of economies such as the US or EU. As many as two billion people globally are not in the formal banking sector, as such mobile money offers money management and transfer mechanisms for those out of the reach of the formalized banking sector. The Sub-Saharan Africa having the most coverage of mobile money, covering 81% of emerging economies, 146 million accounts and 61.9 million active users. This paper specifically investigates mobile money usage in Tanzania, in East Africa. Tanzania has a dominant primary city, Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam accounts for around 40 percent of its urban population, currently standing around 5.5 million, experiencing a population growth of 10-15% each year. The combination of the two factors of population and mobile money penetration will only lead to larger numbers of mobile money subscribers. As such, this paper investigates the potential of Mobile Transactional Financial Data (MTR) for understanding and identifying patterns of consumer behavior.