This is so wrong. Google Wallet is riding on the credit card rails. In Kenya, where the card networks are virtually non existent, the telecom companies stepped in as the network. And last time I checked, in Kenya, you can only send money to those on the same network as you.
This is so wrong. The title was send money with a text message. Regardless of the limitations of M-Pesa, over $25B in value was transferred with it last year, which indicates to me that it's useful and functional, regardless of what you are saying about credit card "rails".
>over $25B in value was transferred with it last year
...Which is attributed to being the first-to-market payment system for Kenya, as the person before you was describing. U.S. and Kenya merchant markets are still an apples to oranges comparison.
Sending and receiving "money" within the same network is fairly trivial from a technological point of view but once you tell customers that it is "money" that they can technically convert to and from cash, I imagine there are significant bureaucratic hoops to jump through, at least in the US. I bet even something as seemingly simple as Chase QuickPay is actually pretty complicated to implement (step one probably being: be a bank)
Help me understand the comment. Are we to be ashamed that some aspect of our country is supposedly behind a third world country somewhere? Is it giving props to Kenya? Is it pointing out how an underdeveloped country can skip ahead in some situations? Is it associating Google with America while knowing that "pay by text" has been around for quite awhile in the US?
PayPal's original business was that you could "email money". Merchant processing came later. The "viral" feature was that you had to sign up for a PayPal account to receive money.
