Looking closer at the credit side of M-Shwari, this is not the first telco-bank partnership to offer short term credit. Airtel teamed up with Faulu Microfinance in May to offer Kopa Chapaa, a 10 day loan up to 10,000 Kenya Shillings. And previously, there was of course M-Kesho from Safaricom and Equity Bank.

We wrote about airtime based credit scoring in March and had contributing posts from Experian MicroAnalytics and Cignifi who both work in this area. With the vast majority of mobile subscribers in emerging markets using pre-paid SIMs, there is incredibly rich data available on airtime purchase and usage behaviours. Couple that with the poor quality of information available at credit bureaus, and airtime based credit scoring is an attractive approach to targeting and risk profiling for credit products.

What does the launch of M-Shwari mean for mobile money? A few thoughts:

• The design of this product suggests telcos may be waking up to the value of their data. Telcos frequently monetise their own data for internal use to design smarter talk time promotions or offer better segmented VAS.  But M-Shwari shows how telco data can be leveraged as an asset to generate external sources of revenues.
• This credit and savings product is being offered through a telco- bank partnership rather than by the telco alone. Telcos don’t engage in direct lending or financial intermediation; rather they are focused on the high volume transaction-fee part of mobile financial services.
• Finally, it is encouraging to see mobile money customers can now earn interest; this benefit has been withheld for too long. Safaricom says 70,000 accounts were opened on the first day alone. But will this vanilla savings offering hold enough appeal to mobilise savings deposits?  One can envision mobile money savings products which better leverage the power of mobile i.e. programmed savings, innovative mobile savings reminders, progress trackers, rewards, etc.

What’s your take on M-Shwari?  What does the launch of this new product mean to you?  Is this a game changer for financial inclusion?  What do you expect the uptake to be of M-Shwari? Share your thoughts with the MMU readers.

When we launched our microsavings initiative – a three-year project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that aims to reach 1.45 million new savers across three institutions in Ethiopia, India and the Philippines – we set out to answer a range of questions, including:

• Will the poorest save via a mobile-enabled channel?
• Can you create a workable savings business model for all parties using a business correspondent approach?

In India, microfinance institutions aren’t permitted to intermediate deposits, and regulators are encouraging the business correspondent model to further financial inclusion.  The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) permitted banks to use the services of intermediaries who act as business correspondents (or agent) to provide banking services.

We saw an opportunity to test the potential of the business correspondent approach as a means of scaling mobile savings services for the poor, working with our long-time partner, Cashpor, an MFI operating in two of India’s poorest states – Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Grameen Foundation launched a partnership to test and scale this mobile-enabled business correspondent approach with the following institutions: ICICI (India’s largest private commercial bank, which holds the savings deposits), Cashpor  (the “business correspondent,” which uses its deep field network to originate and service the deposit accounts) and Eko Technologies (the technology partner, which enables a fully mobile-enabled approach as well as coordination among Cashpor’s and ICICI’s back-office systems).

A Mobile-Enabled Savings Product for the Poor

In our initial client-level research, we learned that 20% of Cashpor’s clients owned a mobile phone, 60% had access to a mobile phone and 20% had no access to a phone. With these statistics in mind, we launched the first savings product nine months ago – a no-frills account (NFA). In India, NFAs have limited functionality – they do not require ATM cards, have no opening/minimum deposit required and do not use check books – but they do allow the client to select whether they want a “pay per use” plan (in which they are charged per transaction) or an unlimited annual plan.

Cashpor customers can open their NFA account and make deposits and withdrawals during weekly center meetings using the mobile phone.  Microfinance clients attend weekly meetings ( which occur close to their homes) to repay their loans.  In this meeting, the center manager not only collects the loan repayments, but also collects deposits and makes withdrawals.  Also, they can check their balance at any time via the phone. Customers conduct their banking via SMS, using a unique set of numbers that informs Eko Technologies of the type of transaction (deposit, withdrawal, and balance inquiry) they are performing.  Eko’s solution works with multiple mobile network operators, making it an agnostic network that maximizes outreach to Cashpor’s client base.

Nine months into project launch, the results so far speak for themselves: More than 60,000 savers have opened accounts, with an average of 250 people opening a savings account each day. The average savings balance is 348 rupees (US$7.50), and the average balance has been increasing at a rate of 15% per month.

Key learnings

Though we are starting to see initial successes, there have also been a number of challenges on our path to provide mobile-enabled savings for the poor.  We have identified several key learnings for similar business correspondent model approaches targeting the poor and the poorest:

1)      For an MFI like Cashpor, originating and servicing savings – but not intermediating them, and thus not generating revenue from lending the mobilized funds – there are fundamental business model questions.  Cashpor makes the business correspondent model economically viable by providing a full suite of financial services, including pension schemes, money transfers, credit and savings. Cashpor also utilizes its existing credit infrastructure, meaning that savings are evaluated using marginal costs.

2)      Getting the business model right for all parties – including clients – is a challenge. And once the business model is in place, it can be difficult to make tweaks to the products and/or delivery channel given the tripartite agreements in place.

3)      Working together across three partners (ICICI Bank, Cashpor and Eko) requires strong communication flows, ensuring that all parties agree on the objective and that all believe they have an equal stake in the outcome of building a successful business correspondent model.

4)      Clients are hungry for a safe place to save. We are seeing the volume of transactions and the average savings balance increase month-over-month.   And, the very poor can and do save – 68% of Cashpor’s savings clients live below the $1.25/day poverty line, and the vast majority of Cashpor’s existing clients live below the $2.50/day line.

5)      Just because the poor own a mobile phone, it doesn’t mean they know how to use it. ”Mobile phone literacy” is just as important as financial literacy. Initial market research showed that some customers knew only how to press the “green” button to answer and the “red” button to hang up. We needed to place a strong emphasis on educating the customer beyond just why and how to save, but how to use the phone to perform transactions, what to look for in the English-based SMS confirmations and how to ensure that their money is safely in the bank (so if they lose their phone, they don’t lose their hard-earned savings).

6)      Training Cashpor’s field staff to be agents meant that they had to change their interactions with the customer.  It’s not just training on the savings product; other critical elements include training on the change in processes, how to interact and engage with their clients, and how to continue to provide good customer service in this new model.

Though there is still much to be learned from our work with Cashpor, there is promise in this business model.  We are looking forward to the challenges ahead of us, creating solutions to resolve them and ensuring that we have created a business model where all three partners can continue to provide savings services to the poor and poorest.

Additionally, in light of market saturation, MNOs face the task of growing average revenue per user (ARPU) and market share in rural areas. Agricultural Value Added Services (Agri VAS) present a considerable business opportunity due to the enormous potential user base in LDCs. The farming sector in these countries often suffers from chronically low productivity. Lack of information acts upon productivity and income levels like a glass ceiling.  However, with increasing teledensity in the developing world – Africa is being tipped to pass one billion mobile subscriptions and become the world’s second largest mobile market by 2016, mobiles are uniquely positioned to address the information and financial needs of farmers – an intervention that can help increase their incomes, yields and economic wellbeing.  Vodafone’s research indicates potential $138 billion addition to developing world farmers’ incomes by 2020

The financial and information opportunities at the base of the pyramid (BOP) in themselves hold significant untapped value for the private sector.  The BOP has both intricate financial and information needs, which have the potential to be met through mobile money and information-based mobile services.   Mobile Money can reduce the financial gap for farmers by giving them access to savings and insurance, which in itself reduces the impact of extreme weather and allows for greater investment in improving production.[1] Meanwhile, m-information services have the potential to open up significant markets opportunities, by relaying sales prices, GIS-based commodity demand information, as well as more basic yet essential information on agricultural best practices and reliable weather forecasts.

While there are existing agricultural information services provided via traditional channels such as radio and television, government extension services as they are usually referred to can be made much more efficient by leveraging the mobile channel. This can help improve their quality and trust amongst user communities increasing their potential for scale.  In addition, by linking to them to mobile financial services, farmers will not only improve their productivity but will also be empowered to make better investment and risk management decisions (e.g. request credit for new fertilizers or other inputs they need to grow more and better crops). These benefits are also likely to extend to the wider community as increased agricultural income helps rural families afford education, healthcare and other services.

The GSMA mAgri Programme

The Mobile for Development’s mAgri Programme was set up in 2009 to accelerate the development, provision and adoption of mobile solutions to benefit the agriculture sector in emerging markets. In June 2011, the programme announced the second phase of their mobile agricultural programme, the introduction of the mFarmer Initiative, a partnership between GSMA, USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  The scope of the mFarmer Initiative is to support mobile phone operators and agricultural partners in launching commercially viable mobile information services that bridge the information gap and increase the productivity and income of rural small-holders.  It aims to attract 2 million of the worlds’ poorest farmers to become users of mFarmer Services by 2013. This compliments their previous work on mobile agricultural services in India and Kenya.

The team has recently launched the Agri VAS  Market Entry Toolkit which explores the opportunities for Agricultural VAS  and covers emerging best practice on marketing, service design and business modelling.  It is primarily addressed to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), other service providers, and agricultural organisations that are looking to partner and launch Agri VAS.

Just as the successful provision of mobile financial services for the BOP requires innovative partnership models; Agri VAS will require similar efforts from the part of its stakeholders.  While MNOs have a leading role to play, they will need the collective support and partnerships from key stakeholders in the agricultural supply chain in order to fully unlock the benefits for farmers in LDCs.

[1] For more information on agricultural m-insurance, visit the MMU Insurance Topic Page

In Uganda, the majority of senior citizens live in rural areas where 85% of the active population is engaged in agriculture and only 7.1% of them have access to pensions. Like many seniors around the globe, they experience poverty, ill-health and malnutrition.  Recently, the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development launched the Senior Citizens’ Grant under a cash transfer scheme called “Social Assistance Grants for Empowerment” or SAGE.  MTN Uganda has partnered with SAGE to deliver these funds to the beneficiaries via MTN’s MobileMoney platform. Beneficiaries will receive 23,000 Ugandan Shillings on a monthly basis and the project hopes to reach 95,000 households over the next five years. Beneficiaries who do not have mobile phones will be given SIM cards which they will be able to use at MTN’s EasyTalk call boxes where Mobile Money agents will be stationed.

Across the border in Kenya, where the “informal sector” term was first used back in 1971  The  “Jua Kali”—in Swahili “hot sun”—are  self-employed informal workers.  Statistics from the Kenyan Ministry of Labour estimate that only 15% of the 10 million workers in the country are enrolled in retirement benefit schemes, and that 70% of them without the scheme were jua kali.

Earlier this year, the National Jua Kali Cooperative Society and the Jua Kali Association launched a new pension product with can be funded through M-PESA and Airtel Money. Users can now save for retirement via the Pay Bill feature starting at Kshs. 20 (US $0.24). This product has allowed Jua Kali to double the number of pension accounts in only six months and is targeting 8.5 million people involved in the informal sector.

Mobile money can greatly reduce the transaction costs in low income pension schemes making them more viable.  The Jua Kali Association has plans to expand this service to the East African region and we will be writing more on these developments in the future.

Launched in 2010, FrontlineSMS:Credit is a social enterprise that produces software tools to enable organizations and businesses to easily use mobile money. Realizing that there was a gap in the market for an efficient way of managing organizational data, FrontlineSMS seized this opportunity and linked FrontlineSMS’ existing platform to mobile money.

FrontlineSMS:Credit derives its name from its original target market: MFIs. In the early days of mobile money, MFIs wanted to connect to mobile money services in order improve their processes and reduce their transaction costs, especially in rural areas. However, since MFIs are complex entities in terms of financial needs, FrontlineSMS:Credit has decided to broaden  its scope and target a wider group of  organizations that also trade directly with the BOP and which could also benefit from mobile money such as NGOs and SMEs.  Nathan envisions the role of FrontlineSMS:Credit as that of an interface; a partner for MNOs which helps SMEs, NGOs and MFIs leverage the potential of mobile money.

FrontlineSMS:Credit appears well-positioned to overcome some of the main obstacles that have impeded SMEs and MFIs from adopting mobile money. According to ACCION International, one of the biggest challenges for MFIs is the weakness of their technology infrastructure[1]. For example, ACCION International highlights the difficulty MFIs have in connecting to an MNO’s mobile money platform. FrontlineSMS:Credit works as an interface with operators by providing this service.  In addition, a weak country infrastructure (including difficulties to access the internet) often prevents MFIs from using alternative channels. FrontlineSMS:Credit does not require internet access and not only does it provide free turn-key software to organizations, but also serves as an interface, in addition to providing consultancy services to help organizations implement its software when there is no in-house capacity.

FrontlineSMS:Credit is currently running a series of pilots in Kenya with a wide-range of organizations such as a member-owned community-level rural MFI, a microinsurance provider that plans to expand a life insurance and savings product from group to individual distribution through mobile payments, and a final pilot involving local NGOs in Western and Central Kenya which distribute ToughStuff solar products through networks of micro-franchisers.

The software, primarily designed for the Kenyan market, will be publicly released at the end of the year. There are plans to expand to other countries where mobile money services already exist at a large scale, and where there are operators willing to link up their platforms to SMEs and MFIs.  We look forward to hearing more about the developments of FrontlineSMS:Credit in the coming months.

[1] In December 2009, ACCION International published a report on the 10 obstacles for MFIs launching alternative channels, including mobile money channels. In particular, the following elements are listed among challenges: “Technological infrastructure remains weak”, “Dedicated and specialized human expertise for channel projects are lacking”, and “MFIs are unsure about how to engage third parties”.

ACCION International, “Accelerating Financial inclusion through Innovative channels. 10 Obstacles for MFIs Launching Alternative Channels – and What Can Be Done About Them”, 2009

The following is a guest post we’re pleased to share by Ignacio Mas, consultant associated with Bankable Frontier

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.

Let me start with three points, which might help orient the development of suitable savings propositions on mobile money platforms.

Point 1: At the heart of any savings discussion ought to be the question: saving for what? Tough question, when you are poor and have a range of planned expenditures and contingencies you’d like to fund (school fees, home improvements, bicycle, buffer against health emergencies), but you’d also quite like to reward yourself today.

Point 2: To build up savings discipline, people have a tendency to ritualize their savings behaviors: the allocation of moneys to envelopes, the hoarding of jewelry as a prized family possession, the attendance of weekly savings group meetings.

Point 3: People’s emphasis regarding savings is on consumption possibilities rather than time periods.  Economists and bankers think of goals in terms of time periods; people think in terms of products and activities.

What are the implications for aspiring providers of mobile savings services? Savings tools should begin by helping people triage across a range of savings purposes (thanks to Kim Wilson for this nice term). Savings needs to be conceived as an experience, not just as a set of receptacles for funds. And each savings receptacle needs to be directly related to specific goals in customers’ minds.

Doing all this through a mobile phone is a challenge and an opportunity. A challenge, because the kinds of phones that poor people have in developing countries do not present rich user interface options. And an opportunity, because the personal, always-with-you, connected nature of the phone can be used to conceive savings services as a conversation between the client and the provider.

In a recent paper with Colin Mayer, we describe how savings goals can be defined and managed as a system of deferred payments (committed today but paid tomorrow). This means that a whole savings edifice can be constructed merely by adding a couple of optional fields in a standard mobile money transfer user interface: what is the value date for the transaction (default: immediate), and what is the purpose (an alphanumeric field or selectable from a standard list of options).

This allows customers to earmark money they receive today to (for instance) send it home when the rent is due, construct their own sequence of installments to buy a bicycle, or establish a commitment savings pattern to create their buffer against medical emergencies (deferred payments to self).

All these deferred payments would in effect constitute a system of sub-accounts, allowing a very personalized way for customers to view and use their account, but all would operate from the single customer mobile money account. Moreover, imagine the possibilities for credit scoring if the provider knew what a customer’s goals were, how intensively they used the commitment payment/savings feature, and how regularly they contributed to these.

Because savings is mainly delayed expenditures, the savings service experience is a logical extension of the payments experience. Savings are about adding a time dimension to basic money transfers. Presenting savings opportunities as deferred payments has the advantage of reminding people more directly of why they are saving at all.

MMU:   What advice do you have for mobile operators and others who are trying to develop financial services for the poor?

ED: Keep your eyes open, evaluate the impact of what you are doing, be willing to adapt and change, don’t over promise, and measure what you deliver.

MMU:  You touch upon the notion of risk and how agricultural profitability could be 30% higher if there were no weather risks.  In a time of climate change, what role do you see for agricultural mobile insurance products such as Kilimo Salama in Kenya?)

ED: The problem many current weather insurance product is that the demand for them tend to be quite low. The reason is that the products that the market can sustain are not considered to be very attractive by the farmers: these products are generally very simple (for example a weather insurance product will pay you if the rainfall level falls below a specified levels), which make them easy to administer, but also implies that they don’t cover many of the relevant risk: for example it may be very dry in your field but the rainfall at the weather station is above the threshold.  There is a need to continue to develop better products and products that can be administered as cheaply as possible (so that they are worthwhile for farmers). But in the book, we argue that there may also be a need for governments or international organizations to subsidize insurance, at least for a while, while the market gets established.

MMU: The development community believed microfinance could increase the poor’s earnings partly through business growth, partly though new business creation and partly through greater investment in human capital. Yet, in practice microcredit was used not just for business investment but also for consumption, repaying other loans, etc.  Was the non-business use of microcredit its downfall?

ED: No, I don’t think so.  First I think that the problems that microcredit is experiencing today have nothing to do with its intrinsic value; they are mostly of a political nature. Second, it is  a great use of microcredit to repay an old debt: if you have a debt on which you pay 70% interest or more (actually up to 5% per DAY for the fruit vendor), and a microcredit loan comes along, and you only have to pay 25% or 30% in interest, then it really help freeing up money. The rate of returns of doing that is likely greater than what you could do in your business. In a sense I would say that was surprising in our evaluation of a microcredit program in Hyderabad is that few people used their loan to repay an old loans. This was perhaps because they want to maintain a relationship the money lender in case they need money quickly.

I think the problem with microcredit was less what it is doing, which I think is quite respectable and important, than what it promised to do, which was a bit inflated. If the hopes had been reasonable, people would not be so disappointed today. I hope that microcredit will be able to continue and not be a victim of a fad in reverse.

MMU: Increasingly the development sector is turning to RCTs as the new standard for measuring impact?  Every methodology has its drawbacks – how can development practitioners strengthen their understanding of impact?  Are there methodologies complementary to RCTs than need to be maintained?

ED: Obviously I think RCT is a great methodology, and to be honest, I don’t see many drawbacks to it, but then of course I am biased. But there are other useful methods as well. For example, Tavneet Suri is evaluating the impact of M-PESA in Kenya using the progressing introduction of the program across Kenya: essentially she compares places over two periods, and some of them got the M-PESA program in the meantime, while other did not. One needs to be careful in exploiting the data, but this can be done and is very helpful. That said, a program like mobile money lends (or programs that can be layered on it) lend themselves wonderfully to RCT, so there should be a lot of exciting opportunities there.

MMU: Thank you very much

Esther Duflo is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT.. She has received numerous honors and prizes including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40 in 2010, a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship in 2009. She was recognized as one of the best eight young economists by the Economist Magazine, one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy since the list exists, and one of the “forty under forty” most influential business leaders under forty by Fortune magazine in 2010. Together with Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University, she founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2003

For more than fifteen years Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo have worked with the poor in dozens of countries spanning five continents, trying to understand the specific problems that come with poverty and to find proven solutions. Their new book is radical in its rethinking of the economics of poverty, but also entirely practical in the suggestions it offers.  It argues that so much of anti-poverty policy has failed over the years because of an inadequate understanding of poverty.  Through a careful analysis of a very rich body of evidence, including the hundreds of randomized control trials that Banerjee and Duflo’s lab at MIT has pioneered, they show why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives.

MMU: Dr. Duflo, Congratulations on the book launch.   How do you measure impact for financial inclusion?  Widely believed to be an important factor to lift individuals out of poverty, do we actually have evidence that the existence of financial services leads to increased income?

ED: There is some evidence. There is a paper by Robin Burgess and Rohini Pande that looked at the “social banking” regulation in India: for several decades, banks were forced to open bank branches in rural areas. Burgess and Pande found that poverty reduced and poor household were able to diversify their activity when rural bank branches were opened. At the same time, there were many problems with the scheme (not least that a lot of the loans the banks made were never repaid, and ended up being used for political giveaways), so the Indian government eventually shut down the scheme.

There is also a recent study by Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson, where they measure the impact of access to a savings account by randomly offering to pay the opening fees for a number of depositors. They find that not all people who have access to the free account use it: most men did not, and among them, about half of them did. But even though, a large effect was evident: small business owners were able to save and buy in bulk at better prices, so their income increased. They were able to deal better with health shocks, such as a bout of malaria. We need much more evidence on the effect of access to financial services.  The problem is that the cost of opening this savings account is very large (more than 5 dollars by account). Finding a way to reduce this will be essential to make financial inclusion possible.

MMU: A household that wants to invest in a new business uses savings as a way to accumulate collateral and increase the amount they can borrow. Yet many poor households have a hard time finding a place to save.  How can mobile money help address this situation?

ED: There are many reasons why it is hard for poor people to find a safe place to save, but one reason is that banks do not want to deal with very small accounts, due to the fact that the paperwork needed to accept savings is demanding. That means that only bank employees are allowed to handle money that belongs to a depositor. And there is not a bank branch in every town.

With mobile money, if the account is linked to a bank, people will be able to wire money in and out of their savings accounts using local correspondent, without having to trek all the way to the bank. A number of countries have passed new laws permitting this kind of deposit taking (in India, for example, this is called the Banking Correspondent Act), and this may be greatly help by mobile money. This might eventually revolutionize the whole business of savings.

MMU: In the book you make an argument that exercising self-control with regards to savings decisions tends to be more difficult for the poor? How can this problem be addressed?

ED: It is difficult for everyone, but the poor suffer the additional handicap that the goods they really aspire to may be relatively harder to reach.  So even when they have a savings account, or other savings opportunity (like investing in their own business), they don’t always take advantage of it. Innovative financial products that have a “commitment feature” to them. For example, some accounts could be earmarked for a specific goals, ‘school fees’ or ‘fertilizer’, and could not only be released for this goal. Or the money could be locked for a certain period or until some specific goal has been met. A study by Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, and Wes Yin showed that these types of account can help those who take them up to save more. One could design even more creative program targeted exactly around the needs of the specific person. For example, coffee farmers could decide IN ADVANCE, to dedicate part of the big lump sum they get at the end of the season towards a specific goal. We are hoping to pilot soon such a program in Kenya or Tanzania.

Tomorrow we will be posting the second part of this interview with Dr. Duflo.

Esther Duflo is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT.. She has received numerous honors and prizes including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40 in 2010, a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship in 2009. She was recognized as one of the best eight young economists by the Economist Magazine, one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy since the list exists, and one of the “forty under forty” most influential business leaders under forty by Fortune magazine in 2010. Together with Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University, she founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2003.

The Financial Services for the Poor team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sees as its core objective in its mobile money work stream to help develop scalable, profitably sustainable and internationally replicable models that bring high volume, low value transactional platforms to the communities where poor people live and work. We believe this can be an effective mechanism to deliver convenient, safe and affordable savings services to poor people, which in turn can help them better deal with the socioeconomic opportunities, life cycle events, uncertainties and risks they face.

As part of this effort, we convened a Global Savings Forum in Seattle during November 16-17. Our main purposes were to shed a spotlight on the need for safe places to save by the poor, and to discuss how these could be brought to millions of people who currently lack them through partnerships and collaborations between a variety of players. That is why the Forum brought together over 250 leaders and executives representing financial service providers, mobile communication companies, international setting bodies, national regulatory agencies and central banks, academics and financial inclusion experts. The MMU team at GSMA attended, as well as MTN, Telefonica Móviles and Vodacom, among others.

We see a need not only to work at a technical level to develop new viable business models and attractive customer propositions, but also to get the word out on the historical opportunity we now face with mobile money and the early success stories. We were therefore very pleased that the Forum got substantial media attention (see the Agence France-Presse and Bloomberg).

Leading up to the GSF, we were busy writing some dissemination materials which you may find useful as you explain the opportunity to policymakers, banking partners, your own management or key opinion leaders in your country. So we thought we’d summarize what we’ve published recently.

- Ignacio Mas has written several more journalistic, high-level accounts of how electronic payment networks and mobile-based ones in particular can transform access to finance in developing countries. These have appeared in the International Economy, Boston Review, and in a forthcoming issue of World Economics.

- Specifically on mobile money, Claire Alexandre wrote a powerful description of M-PESA in Kenya, dispelling some common misconceptions, which appeared as a CGAP Tech blog post, and Jake wrote in the NextBillion blog about exciting new research findings from two academic researchers who are conducting a large panel survey of people in Kenya, funded by our foundation.

- Jake Kendall has written a survey of the academic literature on the value and impact of savings for poor people.Ignacio wrote a series of posts in the IFMR blog on both mobile money   and the value of savings for poor people. He has also written on the broader challenges for branchless banking in Lydian Journal, drawing on earlier blog posts he authored for the CGAP Tech blog.

- Ignacio and Mireya Almazán have written a couple of pieces about branchless banking, taking a bank perspective. One has appeared in the American Banker magazine and the other is still a draft.

We hope you will find these materials useful in your own advocacy efforts. If you think that there are still gaps in how we are pitching mobile money, please let us know and we can try to address them. Your advice on what is needed is most welcome!

Today, we’re sharing a new article by Bob Christen and Ignacio Mas. This article elaborates on why savings is so important - and suggests how the microsavings model might work in practice. That is, what role each player, including mobile operators, banks and MFIs, might play in developing a system capable of delivering microsavings to all, profitably.

Download the article here and feel free to share your thoughts on the article, and the microsavings challenge generally, below.