Mobile money, also known as branchless banking, brings much-needed financial services to the unbanked in the developing world. Leveraging ubiquitous cellular networks, these services are now being deployed as smart phone apps, providing an electronic payment infrastructure where alternatives such as credit cards generally do not exist. Although widely marketed as a more secure option to cash, these applications are often not subject to the traditional regulations applied in the financial sector, leaving doubt as to the veracity of such claims.

In this paper, we evaluate these claims and perform the first in-depth measurement analysis of branchless banking applications.