This post was co-written by Jeremiah Grossman and Simone di Castri.

One year ago today, 11 GSMA members launched the Code of Conduct for Mobile Money Providers. At the time, the mobile network operator (MNO) groups that had endorsed the Code of Conduct were Airtel, Avea, Axiata, Etisalat, Millicom, MTN, Ooredoo, Orange, Telenor, Vodafone, and Zain. Together, these MNO groups represented 82 mobile money deployments in 51 countries.

Since then, four individual deployments have endorsed the Code of Conduct: Econet (Zimbabwe), G-Xchange (Globe Telecom Philippines), Safaricom (Kenya), and Telma (Madagascar). Today, 71% of the 75 million active accounts of MNO-led mobile money services (and over half of all 103 million active mobile money accounts) are covered by the initiative.

Over the past year, GSMA members have been developing tools to implement the Code of Conduct. The GSMA has worked closely with its members and various technical experts to identify key practices for operationalising the commitments made by providers upon endorsement of the Code. These practices serve as the foundation for a set of toolkits that MNO-led mobile money providers can use to assess their compliance with good practices for each of the Code’s eight Principles. The toolkits will be pilot tested this year and fully rolled out next year. Once the self-assessment process is underway, the GSMA will work with its members to assess the feasibility of a robust certification regime for verifying compliance with the Code of Conduct.

In the process of developing the toolkits, we saw the need to revise the Code of Conduct to streamline the document and ensure alignment with relevant guidance documents such as ISO standards. No major substantive changes were made to the Code, but some of the content was reorganized. Version 2 of the Code of Conduct for Mobile Money Providers is available here.

If you are a mobile money provider, regulator, international organization, or other stakeholder and are interested in learning more about the Code of Conduct for Mobile Money Providers, we would love to hear from you.