Are you the sort of person who likes to visualize data? If so, you should definitely visit the GSMA’s new data mashup on Google Earth: Mobile Money for the Unbanked Deployment Tracking.

The tracker is useful to:

• Track markets with live mobile money deployments
• Assess latent demand for mobile money in each market
• Benchmark approaches to service design and partnerships

CNN looks at the potential of mobile banking to reach the unbanked and gets right to the point – that the real issue is cash:

Imagine your life if you had no access to banks, ATMs, credit cards, or savings and checking accounts — just cash that you needed to hide or carry around. It would be hard to save, plan, get ahead, take chances, or feel secure.

The insanely influential US tech sector website TechCrunch asks, “Is the Internet Finally Robbing the Greedy Financier’s Gravy Train?”

The most amazing thing about the Internet is how many industries it’s wrecked. File sharing and iTunes forever changed music’s economics; blogging and other forms of online content have killed old media; and open source and software-as-a-service have brutalized the expensive, on-premise enterprise software products…Here’s the second most amazing thing about the Internet: The fact that there are still industries it’s barely touched. One of those is finance.

Ignacio Mas of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a new paper out – posted to the Microfinance Gateway:

Savings help poor people cope with life cycle family expenditures and shocks. Only about one quarter of households in developing countries save with formal banking institutions. Large commercial banks find it too costly to reach out to the poor with savings products, and poor people, in turn, do not trust commercial banks.

If anyone doubts the ascendancy of the mobile phone and social media when it comes to people connecting with each other, here’s a story that perfectly demonstrates how social marketing and mobiles can play a positive role, $10 and one text message at a time: “Mobile donations to Haitian relief top $7M.”

Americans have donated more than $7 million to relief for the earthquake in Haiti via text message, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, including more than $5 million to the American Red Cross.

-Jim Rosenberg