We’ve had a superb first day at the 5th MMU Working Group here in Kuala Lumpur. Here are some of the highlights from the presentations and discussions: MMU unveiled some of its latest research on profitability, drawing heavily on data sourced from MTN Uganda (one the grantees from the MMU Fund). The data shows that this mobile money deployment reached break-even after just 14 months.

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…

The Mobile Money for the Unbanked Programme has awarded grants to AKTEL in Bangladesh, Dialog Telekom PLC in Sri Lanka, Grameenphone Ltd in Bangladesh, MTN Cameroon, MTN Uganda and Vodacom Tanzania. This is in addition to the grants that were already announced in October, to SMART, AXIS, Roshan and Oi. The funding from MMU will serve to accelerate these deployments, and the learnings will be shared by the Programme with the wider industry in order to accelerate other deployments around the world. Funding is still available for operators to apply for – if you are interested in finding out more about the Fund, please contact Seema Desai, sdesai@gsm.org.

More information on each grantee after the jump.

The GSMA is providing grants to operators in order to accelerate mobile money deployments around the world. Today, we are able to announce the first four of these operators who will receive grants; these are AXIS in Indonesia, Oi Paggo in Brazil, Roshan in Afghanistan and SMART Communications in the Philippines.

Details on each grant provided below.

The Mobile Money for the Unbanked team has been keen to find out more about what is happening in Asia outside of the Philippines, or at least what the feeling was towards mobile money across the Asian continent. I have spent the last few days at the GSMA Asia Pacific Conference, which took place in Shanghai, China. This event is run by a committee of operators who set the agenda, invite speakers and host the event. The Conference attracts over 300 attendees with strong operator representation from across the region. For the first time at this event, which has been traditionally focused on roaming and interconnectivity issues, approximately a third of the agenda was dedicated to mobile money. In this post, I describe a few highlights from the event.

I’m writing this blog post from Shanghai, where the GSMA Asia Pacific conference is taking place. As delegates were pouring back into the conference hall after the mid morning tea break, I was handed a piece of paper by one of the hostesses – all in Chinese characters except for the words, “Press Release”, “ Roamware”, “Macalla”, “MMT services”. I didn’t need the English translation to work out that this spells the latest acquisition of a mobile money solution by another technology provider.