According to this overview, m-money is the future.
The survey, released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project along with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, asked just over 1,000 technologists and social scientists to opine on the future of the wallet in 2020. Nearly two-thirds agreed that “cash and credit cards will have mostly disappeared” and been replaced with “smart” devices able to carry out a transaction. But a third of the survey respondents countered that consumers would fear for the security of financial transactions over a mobile device and worry about surrendering so much data about their purchasing habits.
Sometimes, those with fewer options are the ones to embrace change the fastest. In Kenya, a service called M-Pesa (pesa is money in Swahili) acts like a banking system for those who may not have a bank account. With a rudimentary cellphone, M-Pesa users can send and receive money through a network of money agents, including cellphone shops. And in India, several phone carriers allow their customers to pay utility bills and transfer small amounts of money to friends and family over their cellphones.
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