Many mobile money services are out there, but what’s different about MTN Mobile Money? In MTN’s recipe for mobile banking success, Chris Bold pointed out three things:

• MTN has teamed up with not one, but nine different banks – and others are knocking on the door.
• Customer sign-up is done anywhere that customers can be found.
• They have built a completely independent network of cash-in/cash-out agents.

Staying on the business model theme, Chris also reacted to the news of yet another mobile operator buying a bit of a bank, this time in China: Mobile operators and banks: If you can’t beat them…buy them!

Mark Pickens asked for a little innovation when it comes to product design for poor people, noting that numerous studies have shown that people want and need a safe way to store (save) money.  Despite that,

…most mobile money services are going to market without any focus on savings. Part of it is operator confusion about how to monetize demand for savings. Do you charge for deposits? Does that then mess with the free cash-in many offer to encourage money transfer? There are valid questions that have to be worked out. But when I talk to them, I hear little effort from operators to really think freshly about their products. Maybe it’s the rush to get to market.

Ben Lyon of FrontlineSMS:Credit sent us this dispatch from Sierra Leone on mobile money and agent incentives.

Lauren Braniff interviewed consultant Normand Arsenault about the importance of information systems and microfinance: to avoid crises, microfinance needs good information systems.

I did a series of interviews from the  the third Global Leadership Seminar for high-level policymakers and regulators who set policy for branchless banking, including mobile banking:

• David Porteous founder and director of Bankable Frontier Associates, on rules of the road for branchless banking in the year 2020
• Paul Flanagan, co-chair of the G-20 Financial Inclusion Experts Group and General Manager, International Finance Division, Australian Treasury – The G-20 eyes financial inclusion using mobile phones, other ICTs
• Daryl Collins, author of Portfolios of the Poor:  The unbanked consumer and mobile banking and the M-PESA surprise, and what we can learn from Brazil about consumer needs
• Ignacio Mas of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: With mobile banking, technology is easy, distribution is not

-Jim Rosenberg