Financial inclusion in Africa runs on cash. Despite mobile money's success, millions of Kenyans — in rural areas, informal settlements, and small businesses — still rely on physical cash-in/cash-out (CICO) points to convert between digital and physical money. Banks and their agent networks are critical to this ecosystem.
But many banks place CICO agents and low-cost CDMs based on intuition or outdated census data. The result: clusters of agents in some areas, complete dead zones in others. Customers walk kilometres to deposit or withdraw cash — or they switch to a competitor with a better-placed agent.
Common problems in CICO network planning:
Every P2P transfer, mobile money withdrawal, and digital payment has a geographic origin. Aggregated and anonymised, these locations reveal withdrawal hotspots where customers convert e-value to cash, deposit clusters where customers need to load cash into digital accounts, and unserved zones — areas with high digital activity but no nearby agent or CDM.
With this intelligence, banks can deploy agents to dead zones before competitors do, replace underperforming agents in over-served areas, install low-cost CDMs in high-deposit clusters, and convert mobile branches to permanent kiosks where demand is consistent.
A bank with a strong digital presence but weak agent network used Locator Map Plus to analyse six months of mobile money withdrawal locations. They discovered a peri-urban area with 12,000 monthly withdrawals but only one agent 2 km away from most users, a market centre with five agents within 300 metres — three of them underperforming, and a rural zone with high digital account openings but near-zero transactions because no CICO point existed within 5 km. The bank deployed two new agents, consolidated over-served sites, and installed a low-cost CDM in the rural zone powered by solar. Within four months: transaction volume in the peri-urban area increased 140%, agent profitability improved, and customer acquisition in previously dead zones increased 25%.
Financial inclusion is not just about opening accounts — it is about making those accounts usable. CICO points are the bridges between digital and physical cash. Placing them without demand data is gambling. Locator Map Plus transforms raw transaction data into actionable CICO network plans — turning unserved zones into growth opportunities while keeping all customer data within the bank's secure environment.
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