Last week, we announced that GSMA has secured new funding (9.8m USD, over three years) from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The MasterCard Foundation and Omidyar Network, for MMU to continue working with the mobile money industry to reach more unbanked customers. We’re really delighted to be partnered with these donors; their support is a clear sign that the donor community recognises the importance of mobile technology to achieve greater financial inclusion, as well as the importance of MMU’s role in helping the industry to achieve its full potential.

The mobile money industry has grown massively since MMU launched in 2009; back then, there were fewer than 20 mobile money deployments in the world, and today, there are more than 100. MMU has played an important role in identifying lessons and best practices, which we’ve shared via case studies, toolkits, handbooks, webinars, Working Groups and field visits. We’ve ...

Today the mobile money for the unbanked programme is releasing the results of the 2011 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey. The survey is, we believe, the most comprehensive attempt to measure the extent of customer adoption of mobile money for the unbanked ever undertaken. In exchange for a guarantee of confidentiality and access to customized benchmarking reports, 52 operators and other service providers from 35 countries provided MMU with detailed operational data about their deployments, including the number of registered and active customers. The full report is now available for download, and over the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing some of the main findings of this survey. Today, we look at the total number of mobile money customer—registered and active—around the world.

The service providers in our sample reported having 60 million customers as of June 2011, a number which excludes customers who transact “over the ...

interoperability is one of the most widely discussed topics in the mobile money industry. Almost everyone has a view on the subject – and to make matters even more complicated, there are almost as many definitions of interoperability as there are opinions about it.

Today the MMU team is releasing a new article that features perhaps our longest title ever: “The case for interoperability: assessing the value that interconnection of mobile money services would create for customers and operators”. The focus of our article is domestic mobile money interconnection, by which we mean two or more mobile money providers in a single country ...

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 ...

One of my first posts for this blog explored how mobile operators could exploit the network effects that characterize mobile money services by “subsidizing” early adopters—that is, by rewarding those who sign up and use a service early with deep discounts or bonuses to make up for the fact that there aren’t many other people on the network to transact with. It’s a classic pricing strategy in networked markets.

Recently, Airtel in Kenya launched a new promotion offering Airtel Money (formerly known as Zain Zap) customers free money transfers to both registered and unregistered customers. Although slated to run only for a short time, this promotion is a clear illustration of an attempt to subsidize participation in a network that has far fewer users than its competitor M-PESA, the most famous and well-established mobile money service in the world.

Such a move is risky, but not crazy. Ignacio Mas has pointed out that the online payments service PayPal lost $23 for every customer they signed up during ...

The (IDB) Inter-American Development Bank TEC-IN programme in partnership with MMU is launching today a Spanish language blog.

http://blog.tec-in.org/

This new blog aims to inform and educate audiences in the Latin-American region about the potential of new technologies for financial inclusion.  The overall objective of the Technologies for Financial Inclusion Program is to help increase and improve access of micro entrepreneurs and low-income people to financial services in Latin America and the Caribbean. Their aim is to help financial service providers in the region to improve efficiency, reduce operating costs and extend the reach of its financial products through testing and implementation of innovative technology services and solutions.

The TEC-IN Programme was created as an initiative of the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), based on the successful experience of its line of activity for the strengthening of financial institutions, and the Capital Market and Finance Division of the IDB, as part of its interest on fostering the use of technology in financial services.

We hope this new regional tool will help interested parties in the field of mobile financial services keep up to date with developments in ...

The following is a guest post we’re pleased to share by Salah Goss and Clara Veniard from the FSP program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

We often hear that M-PESA was able to scale quickly because it targeted an unmet need: urban to rural remittances.  Safaricom based the initial launch of the M-PESA service on the ‘send money home’ proposition because a large proportion of split families in Kenya needed a way to send money to relatives in rural areas but had few ideal options to do so.

In many markets, however, such a clear unmet need does not exist.

The Philippines is a prime example of this. Even though mobile money providers have been in the market for over ten years, they have struggled to gain market share in the face of well known and well established payment providers.  Knowledge and usage of mobile money services are low with less than 4% of users of all ...

Today GSMA is publishing a case study on ‘Giros Tigo’, Tigo’s mobile money service in Paraguay.  With over 100 live deployments around the world, Mobile Money continues to emerge as a must-have service for operators in emerging markets. However, there has been a notable absence of programs in Latin America, with the fewest deployments of any other region in the world. This seems to be changing in 2011 with MNOs in both Central and South America readying for launches. MMU visited Paraguay earlier this spring  to understand how this country emerged as a leader in Mobile Money and what lessons it offers for the region

This case study begins with a summary of the Paraguayan mobile financial ecosystem, highlighting the favourable conditions which have contributed to the development of Mobile Money. It then examines the key success factors of Tigo’s Mobile Money product such as deep market knowledge, successful distribution network, effective marketing tactics, and collaboration with an aligned bank partner.

This will be an important  year for Mobile Money in ...

The MMU team is pleased to share the proceedings from our last working group held on June 27th in Singapore.   We have attached the  presentations and descriptions from the various sessions and will be posting some videos over the next couple of weeks.

Session 1. Introduction. Seema Desai, Director of  MMU

The MMU Programme is running at full speed; this session offers an overview of what the programme has accomplished to date and what our plans are going forward.

Session 2. Ensuring Quality Customer Experiences at Agents. Paul Leishman, Manager, MMU and Guest panellist, Jennifer Barassa, CEO of  Top Image

In this session we explore the role that Top Image, a below-the-line field marketing agency, has played in developing and maintaining Safaricom’s successful M-PESA mobile money industry has doubled in size; and as the industry has grown, so has our understanding of what it takes to create a successful deployment. This  2011 report contains a selection of important best practices and insights that the MMU team have identified.  MMU strives to provide the industry with practical, actionable recommendations for how to create successful Mobile Money services.

This report catalogues our key pieces of work from the last year, including the guide to driving customer adoption of Mobile Money, and the research that we conducted into how banks and operators can succesfully  develop effective relationships to offer Mobile Money services.

In addition to these previously published resources, the annual report  features a new article by Ignacio Mas from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation titled ‘Enabling different paths to development of Mobile Money ecosystems’, in addition to a new case study focused on Tigo’s first mobile money deployment in Latin America.

The 2011 ...