The Alliance of Financial Inclusion (AFI) is a newly established organisation aimed at enabling 50 million people living on less than $2 a day to have access to formal financial services by 2012. AFI is managed by GTZ and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its members are central banks and other policy making bodies in developing countries. AFI's first annual Forum took place in Nairobi, 14-16 September 2009, and was co-hosted by the Central Bank of Kenya. Click to view highlights from the event.

Mobile Financial Services offer significant opportunities for improving the efficiency of financial services by expanding access and lowering transaction costs. The explosive growth of use of mobile money has had the unintended benefit of increasing public involvement in the formal financial system, including expansion of savings accounts in the regulated financial intermediaries.

The globally acknowledged standard setting body for anti-money laundering and the fight against terrorist financing, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has only recently acknowledged that financial inclusion and financial integrity (i.e. the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing) are complementary public policy aims. This has led to a new FATF work stream on financial inclusion which is seeking views from the industry on how to best achieve these complimentary policy aims.

Mobile money services are emerging all over the world and financial regulators are unfamiliar with the money laundering and terrorist financing (ML/TF) risks arising from these new services. The current anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules are often applied disproportionately to the risks involved, thus hampering the adoption of mobile money services amongst consumers, the poor in particular. It is, for example, disproportionate to put a high customer due diligence burden on very poor customers who are transacting very low amounts for legitimate reasons. Excessively strict ‘know your customer’ (KYC) rules can be impossible for the poor to comply with, keeping them locked into the informal economy without preventing ML/TF.

The GSMA MMU team has compiled a comprehensive database of laws and regulations relating to mobile money in over 40 countries. This first set of data which is now linked to the MMU deployment tracker can be accessed via the country pages or on the Mobile Money Exchange Wiki. The Deployment Tracker is a tool that serves the GSMA and its partners by providing information on mobile money in developing countries. At present, the database contains country-specific information on mobile money deployments, general macroeconomic and mobile penetration data, as well as domestic and cross-border cash flows. This new resource means to extend the functionality of the Deployment Tracker through the addition of standardized regulatory content across 40 countries of interest.