A few notes though:
- In some developing countries, the bank notes are worth so little that a few medium value transactions drain all of the notes out of the ATM. Also, poor note quality sometimes clogs up the machine. Having locals run it (rather than centralised cash management) will help alleviate this.
- Having helped service millions of customers, I have realised that when money is involved, people are really fast learners as long as things are kept relatively simple. So mobile banking itself can catch on really fast. People often confuse numeracy (primarily needed to navigate menus) with Literacy – numeracy is much higher. So training of customers has been hard, but not impossible!
- Agent commissions usually make up the single largest running expense of mobile banking deployments. To this end, having cash machines takes away a huge cost for cash-out transactions.