Trevor Perrier
ABSTRACT
This paper presents UW-Pesa, a simple web based mobile money sandbox for fast prototyping and demonstration of financial service products. The purpose of UW-Pesa is to enable academic groups to explore issues of privacy, security, and usability within the rapidly growing space of Digital Financial Services for Development and especially mobile money services. Although financial services are an important sector within the broader field of mobile for development, innovating and understanding core concepts within these services is difficult because the ecosystem is complex and dominated by a few mobile operators. Most large scale mobile financial services rely on either SIM Toolkit or USSD based user interfaces with an assortment of smaller scale services introducing Android based mobile money applications. UW-Pesa aims to create a simplified testbed so that smaller projects can quickly prototype ideas without involving large mobile operators. Currently the major components of UW-Pesa are a web interface, transaction API, and a USSD implementation.
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