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Displaced Populations, Humanitarian Cash Transfers and Mobile Money

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At the World Humanitarian Summit last year, the GSMA committed to broaden the remit of Humanitarian Connectivity Charter to offer expertise in mobile-enabled fund disbursement and disaster preparedness. As the number of displaced people worldwide continues to rise, more ...

Rethinking the mobile money business model to capitalise on adjacencies

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This blog post was co-written by lara Gidvani and Janet Shulist  Mobile money providers today face new prospects to expand or redefine top-line growth by considering new ‘adjacent revenue streams’ that are closely linked to their core payments product offerings. We define ...

The impact of mobile money on the UN Sustainable Development Goals

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The GSMA recently published a report on the impact of the mobile industry on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This report is a first-of-its-kind and it looks across a number of areas such as mobile connectivity, the internet of things and mobile money to establish a ...

Regulation in El Salvador and Honduras: On the Brink of Enabling

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This blog was co-written by Jose Sanin and Jennifer Frydrych. Honduras and El Salvador both released e-money regulation this year, an important first step towards a sustainable mobile money environment. However, in both markets, the regulation lacks clarity and incorrect ...

Highlights from the Mobile Money API Hackathon: Testing harmonised mobile money APIs for the industry

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Over the past year, we have worked alongside key mobile network operators, platform vendors and third parties within the mobile money ecosystem to define harmonised mobile money APIs for the industry. Harmonised APIs will reduce complexity and fragmentation in this ...

Announcing the launch of the 2016 Global Adoption Survey of Mobile Money

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Today, we are launching the 2016 version of our annual Global Adoption Survey. This year’s survey continues to focus on the health of the industry and the development of the ecosystem. The scope encompasses mobile money, as well as credit, savings and insurance products ...

Accessibility of mobile money services in 2015: Agents and technical interface

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In previous blog posts, we discussed the availability and adoption of mobile money services. This post focuses on how customers access mobile money today and how that will likely change in the next couple of years. Today, customers access the service in two ways: via agents ...

How can MFIs leverage mobile financial services? The example of Tunisia

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the second workshop on mobile financial services (MFS) organised by the Union for the Mediterranean, with representatives from the central banks of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. This workshop examined the role of ...

Two Challenges to Help Two Billion Reach Financial Security

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This is a guest post written by Kosta Peric and Jake Kendall. This post was originally published on the Impatient Optimists blog on 5 March 2015. Until recently, achieving financial inclusion for the world’s unbanked poor was a pressing goal with perplexing obstacles. But in ...

Microfinance’s Bridge to the Digital Future

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This is a guest post written by Lawrence Yanovitch, the president of the GSMA Mobile for Development Foundation. This post originally appeared on the Microlinks blog, as part of their series, ‘Studying the Past, Looking to the Future’. Today, a Massai herdsman ...

Mobile credit and savings services gaining traction using different models

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As I write this blog post, I am at the MasterCard Foundation Symposium on Financial Inclusion 2014. There has been a lot of chatter around mobile credit and savings services and I thought this is a good time to look at the constantly changing landscape and the different ...

Mobile money in Côte d’Ivoire: A turnaround story

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After a challenging start, mobile money is taking off in Côte d’Ivoire. In June 2013, CelPaid, Moov, MTN, Orange, and Qash Services had together registered close to 5 million mobile money accounts, 35% of which are active. [1] It is quite an impressive number considering ...

The State of Mobile Money Usage – How many people use mobile money globally?

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Last week, the GSMA Mobile Money for the Unbanked programme (MMU) released its 2013 report on the State of Mobile Financial Services. This month, we are going to present the main conclusions and insights from this report in a series of blog posts. Today, we want to explore ...

The GSMA releases MMU 2013 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Financial Services for the Unbanked

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The GSMA Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) programme today releases its 2013 State of the Industry Report. The report contains key findings and insights on the growth of the mobile financial services sector, including mini case studies and mobile money best practices. This ...

Regulatory considerations for the use of mobile records for retail credit scoring

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The RBI Committee on Comprehensive Financial Services for Small Businesses and Low-Income Households asked us to share our thoughts on the use of mobile network operators’ (MNOs) customer data to establish the financial status and credit worthiness of individuals.

Fresh faces in mobile money: MMU’s new case studies on three mobile money sprinters

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This week MMU is excited to release in-depth case studies on three mobile money deployments. All three of these services are 2012 GSMA Mobile Money “Sprinters,” the club of the fastest-growing mobile money services in the world.

What could we learn from Nigeria barring MNOs from participating in the mobile money market?

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According to its Maya Declaration the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has committed to reduce "the percentage of adult Nigerians that are excluded from financial services from the current 46.3% (39.2 million adult Nigerians) to 20% by the year 2020."

A New Framework for Digital Money Innovation

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This is a guest post by Lynn Eisenhart, Mireya Almazan, and Megan Oxman, program officers in the Financial Services for the Poor team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Leveraging the mobile money ecosystem to increase traffic

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We have previously shared best practices in various areas such as distribution, marketing, and how to improve your internal procedures and org structure to accelerate mobile money deployments.

INOVA: An Oasis of innovation tucked away in the West African desert

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Today we continue our series on mobile financial services in francophone West Africa on the CGAP and Mobile Money for the Unbanked blogs.