For all of these reasons, mobile banking has seen exponential growth in a few short years. M-PESA, launched in Kenya in 2007 by Safaricom, had 20,000 customers its first month. Four months later, it was 150,000; four years after that, 13 million. A market that did not exist as of 2007—the mobile payment market (making payments via mobile phones)—exploded into a $16 billion industry by 2011, with analysts predicting that it would grow an additional 68 percent by 2014. And the benefits appear to be considerable. According to the Economist, over the past five years, incomes of Kenyan households
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