to securely transfer money using a mobile phone without an internet connection (M-Pesa, 2014). To the people of Kenya, this service has changed lives drastically - instead of spending days walking to deliver money to relatives in the next village, you can go to one of the 23,000 M-PESA agents, hand over the cash you want to send and type in some codes on a mobile phone. Your relatives receive a message telling them the money has been transferred to their account, and they can go to another M-PESA agent and redeem it for cash, or alternatively safely store it in the account until a later date. When M-PESA first came to use, an anthropologist researcher found that many of its customers were actually using the service to transfer money to themselves putting some cash into their mobile account before travelling through a dangerous part of the city - only to redeem it later on (Jack and Suri, 2009). This kind of simple transaction is something many of us would take for granted, but it has changed the lives of those with little money. There are now more than 17 million users of the service in Kenya, only 6 years after its introduction. To put this in context, it took the national banks of Kenya over 100 years to reach 5 millions users. When the benefits of new technology outweigh the risks, people are more than happy to play along - just look at the success of Eko and M-PESA. People in these countries are using these services because they are more secure than cash. This can even be translated closer to home; look at the 100+ million users of PayPal safely transferring digital money. While a digital economy may not be as life changing for the western world as M-PESA, when transferring money becomes as simple and secure as sending a text message carrying cash will seem “as unreasonable as toting around a chest full of silver coins� (David Wolman, 2012).
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