Myanmar skips credit cards, goes directly from cash to mobile payments

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. said payments using mobile phones will help Myanmar reduce the use of cash when wireless networks are rolled out across Southeast Asia’s poorest country starting this year. The world’s biggest electronic payments companies emphasized the potential for mobile-phone payments in Myanmar, where the government is preparing to grant two new telecommunications licenses at the end of this month. “In markets where you don’t have that fixed infrastructure in place, it may well be that mobile acceptance is going to be the way to go,” Matthew Driver, MasterCard’s Southeast Asia head, said in an interview yesterday in Naypyidaw. “There’s a great opportunity to leapfrog.” Making mobile phones available to the wider population in Myanmar, where fewer than one in 10 out of 64 million people now own a handset and the majority of transactions are made in cash, would make electronic payments possible. This would mirror the developm