Reviews the emerging literature on the definitions and model taxonomies employed in mobile banking; the status and drivers of global adoption of these schemes; the take-up and usage patterns of customers and their socio-economic impact; and, finally,

This paper presents a new framework which allows people to manage their diverse payment, cashflow management and commitment savings needs simply and intuitively, from a single account. It builds on the logic

Mobile money providers are increasingly pondering the path from payments to savings. If people were comfortable keeping higher e-money balances it would likely increase the activity rate on mobile money transfers, as well as reduce the proportion of transfers that are converted back into cash – a costly step.

Mobile customers who are not on your mobile money scheme represent more than foregone incremental revenue. Never mind that those non-customers are not generating any mobile money revenue – they are actually reducing the value of mobile money for everyone else. That’s inherent in a network business, it’s what we call a network effect. The value to me of being part of the network increases with the number of other people who are on it.

What are you doing to help poor people expand their range of financial options? If you are well advanced on this, the Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to hear from you. We know that poor people around the world save money, but most are not being helped by formal financial institutions to do so. Left to their own devices, poor people have to rely on informal options which are variously unsafe, unreliable, costly, and leave no useful financial history.

agent distribution and the economics of branchless banking is a topic of great importance. Originally published in Innovations, a quarterly journal published by MIT Press, Ignacio’s article offers a definition of branchless banking