Mobile Money as a Financial Data Layer
Africa's informal economy generates billions of transactions through mobile money systems — MTN, Airtel, M-Pesa — that formal financial analysis tools cannot access or interpret. This creates a fundamental blind spot in African economic data. Banks, development banks, and policymakers are making decisions without visibility into the dominant transaction layer. ECADEL LABS is investigating how mobile money data, properly structured, can become an intelligence layer that enables better credit access, economic analysis, and financial inclusion for the 60M+ African SMEs operating without formal financial records.
