Governments and financial sector regulators in the SADC region are skeptical about mobile security and have in many cases refused to grant licenses for mobile transaction services.
But service providers and companies that provide mobile payment solutions meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, claimed this week that mobile phone transactions are the safest, fastest and efficient way of doing business.
It is the first time that industry leaders from Tanzania, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia are working together to improve mobile transactions.
Celpay International CEO Lazarus Muchenje said at the industry meeting Wednesday that, with the continued boom in the cell phone market, the SADC region needs to prepare for a wave of opportunity. Celpay provides mobile payment applications for a broad range of users.
In the SADC region, as in many other areas of Africa, people have to travel long distances from rural areas and spend hours in queues to access bank services in urban areas and towns. Mobile phone transactions however, are designed to make it easy for anyone to send or receive money, pay for utility bills and school fees without having to open or own a bank account.
Many governments and financial sector regulators in the region, however, are worried that mobile banking and payment initiatives will be increasingly targeted for fraud and identity theft.
Muchenje, however, said the meeting in Lusaka was also aimed at creating a platform for best practices in mobile phone transactions in the region.
Although mobile phone transactions have been approved in Zambia, the country's minister of communications and transportation, Geoffrey Lungwangwa, said there is a need to continue leveraging technology in order to build more advanced features and functionality to realize the benefits of ICT.
"ICT has transformed the way of doing business and industry shareholders should explore further strategies to deliver enhanced services to unbanked and under-banked markets," Lungwangwa said.
In countries where mobile phone transactions are restricted, service providers and companies that provide mobile payment solution said they are pushing telecom sector regulators and central banks to come up with policies that support the introduction of new systems.
At the same time, telecom sector regulators and the central banks are locked in debates over who should actually regulate the service. In Zambia, mobile services are regulated by the central bank but other countries want to assign the task to telecom regulators.
Pan African mobile phone service providers Zain and MTN are providing mobile phone transactions mainly in east Africa, but they are being regulated by both the regulators and the central banks. The central banks regulate the mobile transaction service while the mobile and data services are monitored by the telecom regulators.