In 1968, a film titled “Planet of the Apes” captured the dystopian mood of the time by vividly telling the story of an astronaut who gets lost in space for many years, and eventually crashes on a strange world where apes, not men, are at the top of the food chain. The main plot twist comes when the astronaut finds the buried head of the Statue of Liberty, and realizes he is not on another planet, but rather, is on a post-nuclear-holocaust planet Earth – many years in the future. Everything mankind took for granted is gone. Humans are relegated to a life of servitude, subordinate to the super smart race of apes that has come to rule the planet.

This week at the Mobile World Congress has felt a bit like a live-action version of “Planet of the Apes,” with a few differences. Instead of apes, we have apps. The species rising to power goes by the ticker symbols of GOOG (Google), YHOO (Yahoo!), APPL (Apple), though some telecom wags seem to think these are simply four letter words.

On Planet of the Apps, the species running in fear are the mobile network operators.

To whit:

• Google Is Too Powerful, Says Vodafone CEO
• Five Reasons Wireless Providers Should Fear Google
• Google dismisses future as network operator
• IPhone Catch-Up Leaves Nokia, Carriers Flooding Show
• Google now a ‘mobile-first’ company
• Mobile Operators Unite to Fight Apple App Store

How fast is the world changing? The event keynote was not done by a mobile operator but by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, who noted that people under 30 don’t say “mobile phone,” they just say “phone” (fixed line service, what?). In this context, mobile money has become a mainstream driver for reducing customer defections. Operators are seeking to create “experiences” and “relationships” with customers, and not simply become dumb pipes through which services flow.

We heard that many times during Monday’s mobile banking panel with the so called “two billion club,” the five carriers who together reach a third of humanity. And as we’ve also heard before, there’s quite a leap between selling airtime top-up cards and rolling out a distribution network that can handle cash-in, cash-out, know your customer, etc. Operators appear to be learning quickly about the differences between their business model and that of a financial institution. That’s especially true when it comes to systems and internal processes, said Brigitte Bourgoin, Executive Vice President, Orange.

“Information technology spending is typically 3-4 percent of a mobile operator’s revenue. Banks spend more than ten percent of revenue on it – it’s the engine of growth for bank revenue. They have protocols, security, transactions. When I meet people from the banking industry, they talk about the power of information technology,” Bourgoin said.

Two days later, Bharti Airtel CEO Manoj Kohli spoke of the unbanked as he explained how India is projected to have 560 million mobile connections. That’s the population of the US and Indonesia combined, and just over a tenth of the five billion mobile connections the world will have by the end of this year.

“Whether it’s Bollywood entertainment or financial inclusion, millions of these people will have their first experience with such services through their wireless device,” Kohli said.

The numbers in India are amazing. Bharti has 1.6 million retail points of presence across the subcontinent, which reminded me of a comment made by Ignacio Mas: “Mobile banking is fundamentally a retail play. The challenge is not actually about technology.” The whole issue of distribution networks is deemed so fundamentally important (CGAP has been working on banking agents since 2007) that there was nearly five hours of presentations and discussions on the topic.

Mobile banking momentum focused on unbanked customers in emerging markets seemed evident:

• Nokia Money pilot begins in India
• M-Pesa launches in South Africa
• Zap and M-Pesa win Mobile Innovation Awards
• Belgian firm Belgacom signs pact with Globe’s G-Cash on int’l remittance
• Mobile Contactless Payments Trialled Live at Mobile World Congress 2010

It is true that the Planet of the Apps only is a reality for the markets where internet enabled phones are available – and for the people who can afford them. Though Vodafone’s just rolled out a new $15 handset.  As we heard from Stephen Rasmussen earlier this week, such handsets are getting cheaper, more quickly, meaning internet phones will penetrate more deeply into the markets where the world’s unbanked need access to appropriate financial services.

There are many projections about just how quickly the world will get connected to internet-enabled handsets. In fact, this was identified as a key factor for financial inclusion over the next decade in the CGAP/DFID scenarios work. Your humble blogger predicts it will happen a lot faster than any of us realize. What that will mean for the unbanked poor of the world really depends on you – the men and women who read this blog and work in financial inclusion, mobile telephony, policy, and technology.

-Jim Rosenberg