We’re taking a couple of weeks off - but we’ll be back in 2010 with more of your views on mobile banking, information systems, and the countries and organizations that are working to make appropriate financial services available to poor people everywhere. Meanwhile, here are the ten most-read CGAP Technology Blog posts for the year….

1. What you don’t know about M-PESA by Olga Moraczwynski. The story of M-PESA that most of us know usually goes as follows.  The two big players, Vodafone and Safaricom, got together to develop and launch M-PESA. They spent months testing, adjusting, and re-testing the system before it went live. The result—an immensely popular service offering that has radically changed both the financial and telecommunications sectors in developing countries and spawned a lucrative industry for mobile money.  This is not exactly how the story went, at least not in the early days.

2. Mobile money by the numbers by Mark Pickens. It seems like every week there’s a new market study that comes out about mobile banking – but few of those (if any) focus exclusively on the opportunity to be found in serving poor, unbanked people in developing countries. So, with our friends at the GSMA, we thought we’d share a preview of the CGAP-GSMA Mobile Money Market Sizing Study, which includes:

• a projection of the unbanked poor who could be reached globally by 2012;
• an in-depth look at unbanked mobile money users in the Philippines today;
• and a survey of more than 40 operators, vendors and other industry actors.

3. Innovation in India: Microfinance and Information Systems (MIS) by Greg Chen. India has 850 million people who live on less than $2 per day. There is strong government interest in expanding financial services, an active microfinance sector, and fast-evolving business and technology sectors. When it comes to microfinance, information systems are critical to stronger internal controls (over cash flow, financial reporting, portfolio quality, etc.). You can see this in action at Equitas, a new MFI which has more than 200,000 borrowers and follows the Grameen style of group-based lending model.

4. Going Cashless at the Point of Sale: Hits and Misses in Developed Countries by Sarah Rotman. Many initiatives that have sought to push the frontier of electronic money (e-money) and payment devices to drive out cash beyond debit cards have failed, because customers often are not convinced of the need or practicality of these systems. Europe tested the market for these services early on—and collected some high-profile failures in the process, from cash-substituting smartcards in the second half of the 1990s (Mondex, Proton) to interoperable mobile payment platforms in the early 2000s (Simpay, Mobipay).

5. Mobile banking, Cambodia and the financial crisis - interview with Brad Jones of WING, Cambodia. There have been a number of challenges in implementing a mobile payments business in Cambodia. As a relatively small market for handset manufacturers, there are very few handsets that have Khmer unicode capability. This has meant that we have had to design support materials for customers to aid those with low English literacy to use the product.

6. The Hype Cycle and Mobile Banking, 2009 by Jim Rosenberg. From this year’s Mobile Money Summit, the key words are data and partnerships. Data - around the market opportunity for mobile money - by the year 2012 CGAP and GSMA estimate there will be 1.7 billion people with a mobile phone but not a bank account and as many as 364 million unbanked people could be reached by agent-networked banking through mobile phones. Partnerships - a slew of deals announced yesterday illustrate the momentum around mobile banking services, notably: Visa Launches First Commercial Mobile Payment Service in Latin America.

7. One big thing microfinance needs to go to scale by George Conard. If we want to add significant numbers of poor people to the ranks of microfinance (and we must do so), MFIs must have a robust core technology infrastructure that enables them to grow quickly and efficiently. While many MFIs today do have MIS systems in place, a significant proportion of those systems are not supporting the growth and increased impact of the institutions running them. Without significant transformation in back-end technology throughout the microfinance community, the reach and effectiveness of microfinance will continue to be hindered.

8. A view from Indonesia: Real mobile banking needs solid partnerships by Mark Flaming. In Indonesia, mobile network operators are experimenting with e-money services - e-wallets linked to subscribers’ mobile phone accounts. Users can load e-money into their e-wallets and use a mobile phone application to make certain payments. These services are being rolled out to compete with banks which offer customers the ability to make transactions via their mobile phones. But in several ways, these e-wallets cannot compete with the services offered by true bank accounts.

9. Open source and mobile banking? by Mark Pickens. I can load any software I want onto my PC, so why can’t I do the same with my phone? Better yet, why can’t poor people? I’d love to see a boom of cheap m-banking software, designed by people who know how poor people want to use their phones. Although lower-income, non-Western users make up 80% of the world’s new mobile consumers, the guys in Finland, Sweden and South Korea still decide how people’s phones look and feel. But for how long? I’m interested, because I expect usability to be one key in how fast poor people are willing to adopt mobile-based financial services (which CGAP believes can blow open the frontier for access to finance for the poor).

10. A plea from India: give me mobile banking or give me goats (dispatch from the Microfinance India Summit) by Jim Rosenberg. What’s more convertible for currency – a mobile payment or a goat? At the moment, in India, the goat is the only option for many people. So said Vikram Akula, chairman of Indian microfinance powerhouse SKS at today’s plenary session on correspondent (branchless) banking, chaired by CGAP’s own Greg Chen at this (at times overwhelmingly large) microfinance jamboree in Delhi. “We have financial apartheid in India. Yes, we have microcredit. But when it comes to cashless payments and a safe place to save, poor people are not just not included – they are financially excluded,” Akula said. “The business correspondent model, if  done correctly, can end financial apartheid.”