In September, we hosted a four-day industry convening, looking at Open APIs in the mobile money industry. Following growing industry interest in API strategies, providers can drive ecosystem development, enable third-parties to innovate on valuable services, and generate new revenue streams. The interactive event was attended by key business and technical industry stakeholders from mobile money providers, technology platform providers, and ecosystem third parties from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Across the four days, we considered a number of topics, heard from a variety of guest speakers and had some interesting discussions. In this blog, we present some of the highlights of the event, and share key actions the GSMA is implementing to support the industry through the Mobile Money API industry initiative, following on from the event.

Day One	How Open APIs in mobile money can help the mobile money industry and provide benefits to the wider ecosystem
Day Two	GSMA API Specification Refresher on latest 1.1 release of the API and developer tools
Day Three	Industry research exploring APIs and industry collaboration on GSMA API with mobile money business leaders
Day Four	Proposals for next release of the GSMA API and future roadmap and collaboration mechanisms

Event Highlights

We welcomed and heard introductions from all participants… very excited to see this broad coalition of industry members. We started with a welcome by the head of GSMA Mobile For Development, Max Cuvellier, highlighting the benefits of connecting the industry on technology like APIs for socio-economic impact for the underserved, which is the aim of the Inclusive Tech Lab’s support for this programme.

GSMA research from the State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2019 and Mobile Money API Industry Report shows 2019 has been a strong growth year for mobile money, two key trends being that transactions make up the majority of mobile money flows and more value is circulating in the mobile money system than exiting. Enabling third parties to integrate with mobile money services is key to driving ecosystem growth, increasing value for end users and creating new revenue streams for mobile money providers. With fading borders between financial services, we draw similar lessons from adjacent verticals, as discussed in this report. At the same time, in a growing industry, API standardisation continues to be a top priority, as highlighted in The State of API 2020 Report. The GSMA Mobile Money API Specification could be the solution to providing harmonised APIs to the industry.

Across the four days, we had valuable speaker contributions from CGAP on the value of open APIs, World Food Programme on the benefits of harmonised APIs and Airtel Africa on its API strategy. More so, we heard the accounts of adopters of the GSMA Mobile Money API from TerraPay and Africell.

Speaker highlights

Click on each speaker to read highlights from the session.

What we’re doing to advance the Mobile Money API industry

The GSMA Mobile Money API industry initiative aims to advance the industry by providing a harmonised API specification that is collaboratively defined with industry stakeholders. The event provided both a refresher session on the GSMA Mobile Money API, as well as more advanced sessions aimed at agreeing the collaboration approach to the API, proposals to support adoption and governance, and a final session focused on the technical details of moving the GSMA API forwards in these areas with feedback from the industry.

Following the event discussions, GSMA will prioritise its advancements in the following areas:

Research

The Mobile Money API Industry Report for 2019 indicated ecosystem development remains a top priority for mobile money providers with ecosystem growth supported by offering a wide range of payment API-enabled use cases. Future areas of research and engagement with service providers aiming to use such APIs will be valuable to analyse the service provider perspective on the API proposition and give recommendations on the challenges in this area.

Adoption support – Mobile Money API Compliance programme

The GSMA provides support services for API adopters. One of these proposals was an API compliance verification programme, provided as a way of enabling providers to obtain and demonstrate their compliance to the API to the market. The service will provide compliance streams for both mobile money providers and service providers, who provide GSMA Mobile Money API Spec conformant APIs as part of their platform, and the API compliance process will be published.

API approach – Use case views

Evolving the Mobile Money API specification from the current technical specification approach to an additional modular view will allow a company, as a developer or an end user, to easily see which parts of the specification are of interest to them. This modular approach also provides alignment with API compliance described above and collaboration working groups described below. The proposal indicated how use cases were mapped to the current API specification endpoints and the proposed 7 mobile money platform use cases and 3 third party platform use cases.

API roadmap

The GSMA proposed a new release of the API Specification, presenting a range of RFC proposals for the proposed 1.2 version which had been formulated from previous industry feedback and enhancements. These included RFCs for Bills, Accounts, Transactions & Quotations, Mandates and Authentication Codes and other areas. The longer-term roadmap and new scope included the W3C Web Payments API-GSMA Mobile Money API proposal and a number of proposals including new APIs and enhancements for the specification.

API collaboration

The GSMA considered the future direction of the initiative for the coming phase, including strategic priorities for enhancing specification functionality, adding new scope, and driving adoption, as well as a high level governance structure including a API Governance Board and API Working Groups. The industry agrees that dedicated working groups allows advancement of the API by bringing together different stakeholders to advance industry collaboration. The key groups proposed were for Disbursements, International Money Transfers Bill Payments, Merchant Payments, and Recurring Payments. Around Disbursements support for restricted cash payments, usage APIs and voucher support to facilitate common NGO requirements around beneficiary support were of interest. Around IMT the importance of agreeing common APIs between IMT providers and MMPs was of interest; currently the proliferation of many 100s of IMT providers with different APIs provides an integration challenge for both parties.

Collaboration mechanisms

Since the event, we have created an online community, community.mobilemoneyapi.io, which is available to all members of the mobile money ecosystem who are interested in collaborating on common APIs. We have shared the proposals which were discussed in the Open House for the mobile money industry to collaborate on the Mobile Money API Specification: API Use Case Proposals and the API Spec 1.2 RFCs. In the future we will use this space to publish beta and full releases of the API Spec and information on related programmes and working groups. By having a single intuitive space to easily exchange ideas and feedback with all industry members as well as the GSMA will make collaboration simpler than ever.