Think of a scenario in which we have a mobile user in India and he wants to send money to his relative living in Africa who does not have any bank account.
You can send hard-cash of-course but the idea is all about how fast and securely you can send money to the receiver. And sending hard cash is always risky and time taking in such cases. Also there are many places in world where you can get electricity or water via mobile money, of-course there are pre-requisites which are required.
Lets understand this use case more deeply. I being a user wants electricity from an electricity corporation. There are ofcourse many ways to do it, but what if you want to do it fast with pace and ease it is always better to get it done in less time and effort. Let see how can we set this up. What do we need for this?
We need a user/consumer who wants electricity , a provider who will send the services to the user, an operator who will actually transfer electricity, an account via which this movement will work, money inclusive currency/amount, and a bank which will drive in/out of money. How to register? One can register via thier mobile number. This is all we need, how this set up is done? we can register our-self with the vendor,once we will have a account we are through. We need to know if the transfer is national or international depending upon the scenario we need to apply foreign exchange rates.
Flow will work like this , a user raises a request to get electricity. Requests needs to be registered in an corporation which serves electricity. After registration, one needs to add money according the rates to its e-wallet. From where this money will come?
There are different ways via which you can add money to your e-wallet. You can give hard-cash to an agent and he with his account can add amount to you account. Just like getting mobile recharge via physical local vendor. Or you can try bank account transfer to your e-wallet account. And the vendor will cut his fee in between.
Once you have money in your account, you can start with the services. The request will be forwarded to the actual vendor he will check the authentication check and once he is done with sanction screening of the user, he will start processing the request if and only if the request is with-in a country. If its international transfer then some more fee needs to be deducted from your account. After this you need to approve the transaction by USSD code, or SMS, or email etc. After the approval vendor will deduct the amount from your account and provide you the services of electricity.
This use case can be applied to many other areas like water consumption, NEFT transfer , RTGS transfer, bill payment, disburse of funds like salaries, loans, etc. This is how the m-commerce industry is running . This flow of soft money via this use case makes sense in real world scenario in countries where citizens are unbanked. Other advantages could be anti-fraud potential , seamless take away of money and goods.