With more than  US$325 billion emitted in 2010, up 6% despite the challenging economic environment, international money transfers are vital to emerging market economies. Further the World Bank estimates that this will increase to $374 billion US by 2012 and will be narrowly second only to foreign direct investments for cash injected into developing markets. Clearly remittances will be a key component of mobile money services of the future.   By leveraging the existing mobile wallets deployed by operators, financial institutions and third parties, there exists an opportunity to reduce the cost of cross border remittances and increase the final cash amount available in the receiving economy. Further by providing the funds directly to the mobile wallet consumers have immediate access reducing their opportunity cost to collect, a significant barrier in the emerging markets.

Finally, operators with their mobile wallets acting as the connection directly to the consumers and their agent network servicing the cash in/out facility for this connection, bring significant value to the new remittance system. It follows that a successful commercial model is possible with healthy margins that can further increase the profitability of a mobile money platform.

In this section we highlight articles, blog posts and other resources that operators might find useful when researching this topic.