Barcelona will take on a distinctly mobile flavour next week, as 50,000 people descend on the Catalan capital for GSMA Mobile World Congress. Monday will be devoted to mobile money, and our 4th MMU Working Group will take place on Tuesday.

When the MMU Programme was officially launched at MWC last year, the MMU message ringing through Barcelona was about opportunity and potential; we announced that there were 1 billion customers with access to a phone today, but no access to formal financial services… And that serving these customers presented a US$5 billion direct revenue opportunity for mobile network operators by 2012. As we announced the MMU Fund – set up to accelerate deployments around the world – all eyes darted around the room, eager to see where the next MPESA success story would spring from.

A year on, we’re still waiting for our next MPESA – such success stories don’t arrive overnight, but we have a clearer view of where the next one might come from, and most importantly, what it will take to make it happen. We’ve dug into the detail around a number of mobile money models, including True Money in Thailand and WING in Cambodia – we understand who their customers are, what the value proposition is and why they are set up in the way that they are (focusing particularly on why deviations from the MPESA model have been needed in these markets); we have a better understanding of the challenges that exist around mobile money, particularly in the area of agent networks and how to build, incentivise and manage mobile money distribution successfully; and we have allocated nearly all of the MMU Fund to projects which are going to contribute massively to our understanding of mobile money, through testing hypotheses around aspects of distribution, the provision of more sophisticated services such as savings and insurance, and how to acquire and activate customers.

So the focus of our Working Group will be to share these learnings with the industry – from our case studies, our ongoing research on agent networks, early insights across the Fund portfolio, and from key operators themselves such as Zain, Grameenphone, SMART and Roshan. We’re keen to hear your views and to gain further insights from you which will help to further enrich these learnings. The MMU team is very excited about Barcelona – we look forward to meeting many of you there, for what is sure to be an interesting, insightful (and exhausting!) few days.