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Introduction

The rapid rise in the growth of mobile technology throughout the world is a phenomenon that has been particularly remarkable among poor people, largely because of the prepaid model. As a result, all classes of society now have access to financial services as people become increasingly familiar with a mobile-money system.

In fact, mobile technology, viewed as a payment or banking channel, has the potential to allow two important questions to be addressed at the same time: on the demand side, it represents an opportunity for financial inclusion among a population that is underserved by traditional banking services. On the supply side, it opens up possibilities for financial institutions to deliver a great diversity of services at low cost to a large clientele of the poorest sections of society and people living in remote areas.

Although there are more than 120 mobile money projects being undertaken in about 70 emerging markets (Beshouri et al. 2010), mobile payment has only become a normal practice in a few countries, despite its huge potential. The lack of worldwide dissemination of a service with such a huge potential shows that successful cases are not clearly understood, and as a consequence, are not being easily replicated. This suggests that lessons are not being learnt from the places where the system has been successfully adopted. Furthermore, we suspect that the obstacles to its adoption in most countries are not being investigated deeply enough to allow implementation strategies to be employed on the basis of reliable business models. If these issues can be clarified, the potential social and economic impacts of mobile money can be more effectively measured and this can persuade policy- makers to create favourable regulatory environments for fostering the practice of digital payments.

In view of the importance of mobile mone y and payment initiatives, and the gaps in the current state of knowledge in the field, the objective of this paper is to provide a knowledge base on mobile money, based on a comprehensive literature review, and can be employed to identify significant experiences, together with the models being deployed around the world, especially in developing countries. Although there are literature reviews currently available both in the general context of mobile payment (Dahlberg et al., 2008) and in the field of mobile financing in developing countries (Duncombe and Boateng, 2009), the present work focuses on mobile payment/mobile money (as opposed to mobile financing in general) with a special stress on local

development (but not limited to works that deal with development or developing countries). This article also updates and substantially expands the existing literature reviews on the subject. While Dahlberg et al. analysed 73 peer-reviewed papers, and Duncombe and Boateng reviewed 43 research papers (17 peer-reviewed and 23 non-peer-reviewed), the present review examines a total of 196 papers (94 peer-reviewed and 92 non-peer-reviewed) published between 2001and 2011.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines the theoretical background for this paper; Section 3 describes the methodology employed. Following this, the results are analysed in Section 4. Lastly, Section 5 discusses the results and makes some concluding remarks for the paper.