The GSMA Mobile Money for the Unbanked programme (MMU) was launched to accelerate the availability of mobile money services to the unbanked and those living on less than US$2 per day. Supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MMU has the goal of reaching 20 million people by 2012.

The purpose of our deployment tracker has been to document the industry’s progress towards reaching this goal — and ultimately making mobile money a mainstream business.  In May 2011, the deployment tracker reached 100 live deployments.  It is important to highlight that the majority of Mobile Money deployments are located in unbanked markets – 88% of the live ones and 98% of the planned ones. In addition, we find that in terms of the top group-wise split of live deployments: Bharti – Airtel Group leads the industry with 9 mobile money deployments, closely followed by MTN with 7, Millicom with 6 and Orascom with 4.

In terms of the global split taking into account developing and developed markets, we find Africa to be the leading with 47% of live deployments, the Americas (LAC) with 12%, Europe with 8%, and 4% in both in the Middle East and North America.

Finally, there are 88 planned deployments which can gives us a preview into the future of the industry.   Africa is expected to continue to drive the pack with 39% of all planned deployments, but increasing take-up in Latin America (26%) versus Asia Pacific (16%), Middle East (15%) and Europe (3%).