With over 100 mobile money services around the world, it should come as no surprise to readers of Mobile Money Transactions that almost half of these are in the African continent. With 51 deployments it’s very easy to say that Africa is where the revolution will start from.

For all the talk of potential systems from Apple, and trials on the New York MTA, the real action, and social change, is happening away from North America. But what’s interesting to me is that as Mobile Money systems become more prevalent and accepted by a society, they begin to have positive side effects.

An increasing number of small businesses are using Mobile Money systems such as M-Pesa to bring down their per-transaction costs on goods and services, making their businesses more viable, more profitable, and able to offer a wider range of services to their customers… all because of the flexibility that they have to make and take payments.

Given that the current systems have a huge scope to be extended in the near future, it’s going to be very interesting watching not just the systems, but what change they foster, over the next few years.