Mobile Money: Understanding and Predicting Adoption

Mobile money services such as M-Pesa enable people to send, receive, and store money using a mobile phone. We studied whether patterns in anonymized mobile-phone data could help explain who adopted M-Pesa and how they used it.

The study combined records of mobile-phone activity with mobile-money transactions. A person's general level of phone use and the number of M-Pesa users in their communication network were both associated with adoption, while mobility and calling patterns helped distinguish between different levels of mobile-money spending.

The social network added information that individual phone behavior alone did not provide. It may therefore help identify barriers to adoption or differences in how customers use the service.

Two charts compare the mobile-phone and social-network signals most useful for predicting M-Pesa use and spending.

The most informative signals differed between predicting future M-Pesa use and predicting spending.

The research was a collaboration among Vodafone Research, Vodafone Group, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and the University of Trento.

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Simone Centellegher, Giovanna Miritello, Daniel Villatoro, Devyani Parameshwar, Bruno Lepri, Nuria Oliver (2018). Mobile Money: Understanding and Predicting Its Adoption and Use in a Developing Economy. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 2(4), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287035

BibTeX
@inproceedings{centellegher2018mobileadopt,
  author = {Simone Centellegher and Giovanna Miritello and Daniel Villatoro and Devyani Parameshwar and Bruno Lepri and Nuria Oliver},
  title = {Mobile Money: Understanding and Predicting Its Adoption and Use in a Developing Economy},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies},
  volume = 2,
  number = 4,
  pages = {1--18},
  year = 2018,
  doi = {10.1145/3287035},
  file = {/projects/mobile-money-adoption/mobile-money-adoption.pdf},
  cites = 25,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}

Mobile Money: Understanding and Predicting Its Adoption and Use in a Developing Economy

Simone Centellegher, Giovanna Miritello, Daniel Villatoro, Devyani Parameshwar, Bruno Lepri, Nuria Oliver
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies ยท 2018

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