Telenor Pakistan and Tameer Microfinance bank had jointly launched Easypaisa, a mobile banking solution for masses, on October 15th, 2009.
An event was organized in Karachi yesterday to mark the third anniversary of service, where Easypaisa also announced the launch of its long pending Insurance accounts.
With over 20,000 agents countrywide, Easypaisa said that daily transactions’ count reached 155,000 worth Rs. 363 million in 2012 for various kinds of functions mainly the funds transfers and bill payments.
Average monthly transactions in 2012 stood at 4.6 million transactions worth Rs. 11 billion per month.
Easypaisa said that it had over 1.1 million customers availing mobile accounts of easypaisa (Omni is said to have 350,000 mobile accounts), a facility through which Telenor customers can carry away Easypaisa transactions their cell phones.
Despite the international funding, Easypaisa has struggled in bringing innovation in the service. This, when coupled with strict branchless banking regulations and high transaction charges, has resulted into sluggish adoption of phone (and branchless) banking services.
Experts opine that Easypaisa, which has made an impression among un-banked masses, has failed to attract large scale transactions involving the banked class. Who could be brought to branchless banking zone if service had offered facilities like internet banking, debit and credit cards, investment and profit sharing banking etc.
