Mobile Money: Changing the face of banking
There are currently over 3
million registered users with
nearly 200,000 new accounts
opening monthly.
financial services. While mobile will bring incremental
Sources:
1 GSMA MMT Programme: Interested in MMT?, January 2008
benefits to banking as a new channel in the developed
2 The East African (Nairobi): How Vodafone earns millions of dollars in fees from
world, the speed of evolution and growth in the
Safaricom, December 2007
developing markets may leave the traditional financial
3 Olga Morawczynski, Innovations in Mobile Banking: The Case of M-PESA,
November 2007
institutions behind, especially if they do not recognise 4 Center for Financial Services Innovation, Mobile Financial Services and the
the new dynamic and respond with agility, commercial
Underbanked: Opportunities and Challenges for Mbanking and Mpayments,
April 2007
awareness and, of course, a deep appreciation of
emerging customer needs.
fIrsT GooGle androId Phone debuT
T-Mobile showed off its new G1 mobile phone in September, becoming the first carrier to offer a device
run on Google’s Android open source mobile platform.
The device, developed by HTC, has many of the features commonly seen on other smartphones on the
market, including a touchscreen with drop-and-drag capabilities, a pull-out QWERTY keyboard, and a
host of Web-based applications for maps, music and instant messaging.
But the big reason that the phone has generated buzz in recent weeks is because it will be the first ever
to run on Android, a Linux-based open source mobile platform that Google first debuted last November.
Google has long said that the goal of the platform would be to spur innovation within the mobile
development community and also to give users the ability to switch to new carriers without switching
their mobile devices.
Interestingly, the G1 will not let users connect to other Android-supporting networks, as anyone who
purchases the device will have to sign a two-year voice and data agreement as a precondition. Andy
Rubin, Google’s senior director for mobile platforms, said that the T-Mobile G1 was still an important
development because it would open mobile networks to support new and innovative applications created
by third-party developers.
T-Mobile’s unveiling of the world’s first Android phone comes ten months after Google first announced its
intention to distribute Android as an open source mobile operating system.
Source: Networknews, 23 September 2008
Perspectives on the future | 13
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