Design and Evaluation of Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Agent-Facilitated Mobile Money Services in Kenya

Mobile Money (MoMo), a technology that allows users to complete financial transactions using a mobile phone without requiring a bank account, is a common method for processing financial transactions in Africa and other developing regions. Users can deposit and withdraw money with the help of human agents. During deposit and withdraw operations, know-your-customer (KYC) processes require agents to access and verify customer information such as name and ID number, which can introduce privacy and security risks. In this work, we design alternative protocols for MoMo deposits/withdrawals that protect users’ privacy while enabling KYC checks by redirecting the flow of sensitive information from the agent to the MoMo provider. We evaluate the usability and efficiency of our proposed protocols in a role-play and semi-structured interview study with 32 users and 15 agents in Kenya. We find that users and agents prefer the new protocols, due in part to convenient and efficient verification using biometrics as well as better data privacy and access control. However, our study also surfaced challenges that need to be addressed before these protocols can be deployed.