The GSMA today announced that executives from ARM, Best Buy, China Mobile, Citigroup, ISIS, Juniper Networks, Sprint and VimpelCom will be speaking in the keynote programme at the GSMA Mobile World Congress, which will be held 27th February – 1st March 2012 at the Fira de Barcelona Montjuic in Barcelona. The GSMA also provided updates on other elements of Mobile World Congress, including App Planet, the GSMA Forum Series and the mPowered Brands programme.

“The line-up of keynote speakers announced today strengthens what is an already unparalleled conference programme,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer, GSMA.  “Mobile World Congress attendees will have the opportunity to hear from many of the mobile communications industry’s most influential leaders across our four-day programme.  We’re looking forward to a very exciting event in February.”

New keynote speakers at Mobile World Congress include:

• Warren East, CEO, ARM
• Brian Dunn, CEO, Best Buy
• Xi Guohua, Vice Chairman, China Mobile
• Vikram Pandit, CEO, Citigroup
• Michael Abbott, CEO, ISIS
• Kevin Johnson, CEO, Juniper Networks
• Dan Hesse, CEO, Sprint Nextel
• Jo Lunder, CEO, VimpelCom

Previously announced Mobile World Congress 2012 speakers are:

• Ben Verwaayen, CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
• Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO – AT&T Mobility and ...

This is the fourth post in a series about product innovation in branchless banking. In the last post we threw the focus on direct observation of consumers to source deep insights that lead to better products. We also released our detailed analysis. Today’s post describes a second key feature of the three Product Labs which will be established by CGAP’s bank, telco and other partners.

Let’s say you are a manager who has bought into developing products beyond the standard liquid wallet and P2P functionality ubiquitous in branchless banking. You want to innovate. Then you run smack into the existing biases, procedures, and requirements of your own company.

If you are not careful, your good ideas will die a slow death of endless internal analysis or be outright rejected because “the data’s just not there”. As one manager told us about his company, “This place is run by accountants. If you don’t have the data, you go nowhere.” How can you feed the beast and move forward rapidly to approval?

This is the question confronting senior managers CGAP interviewed at more than a dozen firms that ranged from a success story in mobile money in East ...

Recently, the CGAP Microfinance Blog hosted a series on the role that public funders can play to promote branchless banking. The series was launched in conjunction with a new CGAP Focus Note that highlights emerging lessons from public funders in this space. Regular readers of this blog are very familiar with the excitement around branchless banking and are probably aware that branchless banking is primarily being driven by the private sector. In fact, private investors have provided about 80% of the estimated $400 million in debt/equity investment in the sector. However, public funders are eager to use their resources to help bring branchless banking to more and more countries. Given the current momentum, is there a meaningful role that public funders can play without crowding out private investment?

The new Focus Note and series attempt to answer this question. We spoke with public funders that have already been active in this space and developed case studies to understand what role they played and why. We found that public funders can play an important and additive role in developing branchless banking services. However, they should ensure that their involvement includes one or more of ...

So, did you see what wasn't announced by Apple? That's right, while the new iPhone (the 4S) comes with a new faster processor, likely more memory, and a rather nifty voice recognition system that leverages the cloud for processing and parsing your questions, it is missing something that many of us were expecting.

NFC.

The lack of near field communications could be down to practical hardware reasons (the late inclusion of a micro-SIM card might have used the physical space and power that NFC would have needed), or that Apple haven't managed to crack a mobile money system that has a beautiful simplicity so it continues to be iterated in private till it "just works".

No matter the reason, everyone in the space has another six months to a year to work on mobile money projects before the iGorilla enters the room. That means Google and the Android handset manufactures can work away with their NFC solution using Google Wallet. Paypal can continue to push their non-hardware specific alternative. That means there's little chance of an alternative technology taking the PR inches out of the London Olympics and the contactless payment trials going ahead.

It doesn't mean that Apple are not going to come ...

As a provider of mobile money transaction platforms, we get to work in some of the most interesting and remote parts of the world.  One such place is Papua New Guinea (PNG) where we were recently selected to power Digicel Group’s cellmoni mobile money service.  This service includes all the normal things you’d expect, as well as the ability to transfer money to friends and family anywhere in the country.  Also powered by Telepin and hosted on the Digicel network are Post PNG’s MobileSMK and MiCash from Nationwide Microbank.
 
There appears to be great demand by residents of PNG for a system that enhances cash safety, which includes phone transfers and a means to transact, store and accumulate value for later use.    The solutions from Digicel, Post PNG and Nationwide Microbank are delivering a best-in-class solution that extends value to PNG mobile subscribers, merchant networks and ecosystem partners.
 
Telepin’s Cayman Transaction platform is used by all three providers for mobile financial services (MFS) offerings.  The service is regulated by the Central Bank of PNG and has been developed in partnership with Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme (PFIP) with a view to promoting financial inclusion within ...

This is the first post in a five-part series about product innovation in branchless banking.

The promise of branchless banking is increased access to finance for the poor and new revenues for providers of all stripes. That’s not happening yet.

CGAP counted 22 branchless banking services with more than 1 million registered users; we also counted more than 70 others which have not reached that threshold (as of Q1 2011). That’s about a 1 in 4 “hit rate”. If we look at services which have launched since 2007 (i.e. since M-PESA got everyone excited) and acquired more than 250,000 active users (a better indicator of traction in the market than registrations), success rate drops to 1 in 15. Not so hot.

This might just be the growing pains of firms still figuring out how to operate in this new space at the intersect of several industries (mobile, banking). Some providers have fallen into regulatory ruts, some are finding it hard to build robust agent networks, while still others are struggling to make technology platforms stable (often wrestling with vendors who provided them in the first place). In short, there is a lot of worthwhile work going on laying the rails ...

As regular readers of this blog will know, we  are excited about the developments that we’re seeing in branchless banking in Pakistan, which have led us to call it a “laboratory” for innovation. Most recently I interviewed Mansoor Hassan Siddiqui, the Director for Banking Policy and Regulations at the State Bank of Pakistan about the recent changes to the Branchless Banking Regulations that, among other things, removed the need to capture biometric information at the time of account opening.

These changes to the regulation seem to have unleashed yet more activity. Easypaisa, the longest-established service in the market launched by Tameer Microfinance Bank and their parent company, mobile network operator Telenor, now claims over half a million mobile accounts following a major campaign. The mobile account will complement their over-the-counter bill payment and domestic money transfer services which together have processed a total of Rs 43 billion (US$500 million).

The other major player in the market is UBL, which launched their Omni service in April last year, only six months after easypaisa’s debut. UBL is supporting a number of government and NGO programs in the distribution of cash transfers to nearly two million beneficiaries through their ...

Chrissy Martin is currently a Senior Consultant at MEDA. Previously, she worked for 12 months as the Product Manager for Digicel in Haiti, which has rolled out a mobile money service called TchoTcho Mobile. Through both Digicel and MEDA, Chrissy has worked with several NGOs that are interested in mobile money services to make payments to beneficiaries of cash-for-work programs. She outlines some of practical challenges that have to be overcome to make this a reality.

Mobile Money in Haiti

There are many reasons to be excited about mobile phones as a way to distribute cash transfers, such as government payments or NGO cash-for-work programs. First, cash transfers are often sent to groups of people in multiple locations, and it can be easier to reach them via mobile than to bring them together in one place. It is also easier to track payments if they are sent electronically, which can reduce corruption and increase confidence that the right amount of money ends up with the right individuals. A third possible benefit is that relying on a network of mobile money agents who already handle cash will increase security over creating new systems for transporting cash. This was ...