M-finance and consumer redress for the unbanked in South Africa

The paper describes the nature and impact of mobile financial services (m-finance) and consumer protection in developing countries. Specifically, it explores consumer redress in South Africa's m-finance, a sector responsible for rapidly drawing unbanked consumers in developing countries into the financial mainstream. The Actor-Network Theory is used to identify key actors of transformational m-finance in South Africa. Complaint procedures of the identified providers are reviewed and evaluated against the 2007 recommendation by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on consumer dispute resolution and redress. The research shows that although South Africa is not an OECD member, the legal and self-regulatory environments have fostered what appear to be good consumer redress intentions by businesses. All providers in the study had consumer information on internal redress channels and some even provided additional information on alternative dispute resolution services in the country. Some shortcomings, however, were the lack of standard designs for online complaint forms and not providing expected time frames for the resolution process and possible solutions.