My lightbulb moment came before I joined Tuxedo, when I joined Alliance and Leicester as commercial director responsible for its own startup prepaid business.
Celtel employs around 8,000 people directly, for example, but it and other mobile operators indirectly provide jobs to around 170,000 people in Africa who resell prepaid airtime.
"Open-loop" prepaid cards, which can be used at any retailer that accepts card payments, are also becoming more popular.
FOR the millions of Americans without bank accounts, prepaid cards also called stored-value cards could be the next-best thing.
So card companies are offering "prepaid" cards in effect, debit cards that can be loaded with money (at petrol stations, convenience stores and the like) without a bank account.
Some, such as Visa, MasterCard and China's UnionPay, manage credit, debit and prepaid cards issued by their members; others, such as American Express, pump out their own plastic.
"Mobile phones could not work in Africa without prepaid because it's a cash society," says Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese businessman who established Celtel, a pan-African mobile group now owned by Zain, based in Kuwait.
Customers of firms such as Starbucks and Shell keep billions in the firms' prepaid cards.
At the end of August, it will launch prepaid mobile-phone cards.
One way they are doing this is by offering not the usual service, where users talk and pay the balance of their accounts in arrears, but a prepaid, discounted package.
The problem only grows as benefit programmes strive for efficiency and convenience, shifting applications online and making payments to prepaid debit cards, which can be bought in shops, require no bank account and allow money to be laundered quickly and easily.
