Some of you probably saw a snippet on the nightly news about Secretary Clinton’s speech on Thursday about freedom of the internet and other technology. If you read CGAP’s recent focus note on the future of branchless banking in 2020, you’d know we also think the internet is going to have a deep qualitative impact.

It turns out Secretary Clinton had a lot to say about mobile banking. I found three parts particularly relevant for the work we do on banking the unbanked.

First, she mentioned mobile banking in Afghanistan, where CGAP is helping advise Roshan, in partnership with the GSMA.

Second, she quoted a figure from research done by Olga Morawzynski and published in a CGAP Brief about M-PESA authored by Olga and myself:

“Over the last year, I’ve seen this firsthand in Kenya, where farmers have seen their income grow by as much as 30 percent since they started using mobile banking technology.”

Finally, Secretary Clinton talked about the need to encourage developers to write applications for mobile and internet that will help the poor meet challenges in their daily lives. She cited mobile banking in Kenya, a service in Bangladesh which enables people to learn English via mobile, and a hypothetical website to allow citizens to rate service and honesty of government offices they have to deal with.

What’s more, the US State Department will launch an “innovation competition” to recognize the best ideas. Clearly, this is wider than branchless banking, and Clinton stopped short of detailing what the competition would look like.

But I can easily imagine a range of possibilities from an X prize to a venture philanthropy fund, and I can easily imagine it supporting a slew of mobile payment applications. In order to turn all this innovation into real services for the poor, the State Department’s competition will need to find a way to match bright developers with hard-nosed bankers and mobile operator managers.

-Mark Pickens