The roundtable was attended by MTN, Orange, Zain, Camtel, Citibank, Afriland First Bank, BEAC, BCEAO, Central Bank of Kenya (thanks to the support of the Alliance of Financial Inclusion), Bank of Ghana, CGAP and GSMA.

So why did we choose to host our first regional regulatory roundtable in Cameroon? If you look at our deployment tracker, it’s clear that East and West Africa are hotbeds of mobile money activity, but so far no deployments have been launched in Central Africa - this in spite of the fact that MTN, Orange and Zain all have strong footprints in the region. Our hope is that this will change in 2010, and if Tuesday’s session was any indication, the outlook is positive.

I’d like to highlight two promising themes from the day:

MTN, Orange and Zain all made brief presentations describing their models, and it was clear that each of them have logically divided responsibilities between bank and MNO based on which party has the relevant expertise. It became clear to the participants (and regulators) that there is a clear win-win situation both for banks and MNOs (not to mention the social and economic benefits for Central Africa) when they work together.