The ATM of the future is a phone with an always on Internet connection or phone with text messaging. Think about this. If your friend has never used text messaging but you send them a text message, as soon as they read your text message they are now a text message user – that’s the purest example of viral distribution I can think of. Now consider money transfer via mobile phone. A migrant worker in the California farm belt sets up an account on their mobile phone to act as a prepaid wallet. They load the wallet by walking in to a convenience store and adding money to their mobile wallet at the cash register. If they “text money” from their wallet to a recipient in their family in Mexico that recipient will automatically get a new wallet account the first time they receive money – that’s as viral as text messaging itself. That recipient can “text money” to a yet another new recipient or an existing recipient and so on. At some point in this chain a consumer probably needs access to cash. They can request cash via text message, get a text receipt with a one time use code on it and get cash at a participating retailer bank or individual money agent using their cash code. This cash out code only works one time so it’s completely secure.
What this means is that the mobile phone as an ATM is just as viral as the mobile phone as a text messaging device. This simple process has the potential to help lift billions into the global banking system and out of poverty. The most powerful concepts don’t need to be complex.
