Editor,

Re: "Will growth of mobile money disrupt ATM technology?” (The New Times, July 7).

There will most likely be some opposition to mobile wallets, especially due to the aspect of security where there are no globally accepted rules governing mobile payments as opposed to the card payment standards (PCI DSS) that covers key elements of fraud and cardholder data.

Consumers will want to maintain their privacy, which is difficult with smartphone-based transactions. Because of this, cash will remain important to sales, even if it’s not used as often.

Shoppers worried about their data being tracked may stick to hard currency, but anyone else will simply use the purchase option most easily available to them. Cash will never disappear because there will always be a demand for it—for anonymous transactions, illegal transactions and transactions in far-flung areas where the non-cash technologies haven’t been implemented (especially in emerging markets like EAC in general).

Mobile services will not be able to replace traditional mechanisms because they serve different purposes, market segments and functionality (use-cases), and what will happen in the market is convergence (leveraging off existing non-cash technologies and payment points as well as MNOs advantage of a wide agent distribution) rather than one replacing the other.

Beatrice Musaneza