Potential Applications of Mobile Technology in Rural Markets

This note discusses the perspectives of IFMR Rural Finance and IFMR Ventures on the potential of mobile-based applications to address their existing challenges. IFMR Rural Finance focuses on setting up, running and managing rural financial institutions, and is keen to find ways for:

• Customer enrolment to be completed at the customer's home;
• Customers to be able to transact with each other and with the financial institution remotely, using hand-held devices;
• Wealth managers to be able to communicate with each other and with the management team at each local financial institution through an SMS-based platform;
• Financial institutions to be able to update customers.

Network Enterprises Fund (NEF) is the first fund promoted by IFMR Ventures. Subsidiaries of NEF seek to use mobile phones for:

• Management of orders;
• Information services delivery;
• Cattle insurance;
• Milk collection and milk payment solutions;
• Retailing of energy efficient products;
• Distribution of energy through grids;
• Booking management systems;
• Payments for water purchase;
• Marketing.

Finally, the overall IFMR ecosystem needs technologies to enable information sharing and public information campaigns and surveys.