That’s a key question facing bankers these days, given the cost of establishing a mobile offering and the accelerated pace at which the mobile landscape is evolving. The short answer is “yes”—if you go about it right.

Mobile phone use in Bangladesh is not a luxury now. Almost half of the country's 160 million population uses mobile phones, but very few have bank accounts. There were lot of talks in the past few years on how the big population could be brought under the banking services via their mobile handsets. The GSM Association (GSMA) predicts that by 2012, nearly 300 million of the previously "unbanked" will be using some form of mobile banking.

A revolutionary new communication app has been launched for the iPhone and Android platforms, which automatically shares photos, videos and text with anyone in the vicinity who also has the application. The app, called Color, has been created by Bill Nguyen, who sold his cloud based music locker Lala.com to Apple for $80 million. The app works by using a mix of GPS location data and ambient sensors to assess proximity of other users, who will be able to see any text, videos or photos taken via Color. The application comes with absolutely no privacy settings, so all the photos shared are publicly available to every member within the range. There is also no need to 'friend' anyone, though a blocking option is available.

The Sun is reporting that animal behavior experts have kindly handed out iPads to Gorillas. Amazingly not a SINGLE one of the five tablets which download apps has been broken since being given out at Port Lympne wild animal park three weeks ago.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman gave a speech today about how entrepreneurs can “invent the future”. Speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, he recited a list of 10 rules of entrepreneurship.

Since launching in late 2008, deal-of-the-day website Groupon has emerged as one of the hottest web startups on the planet. Serving more than 250 markets worldwide and boasting more than 35 million users, Groupon is the poster child for a rapidly growing company. One of the reasons Groupon has continued to succeed and expand over the past two and a half years is because the company has managed to keep the pace with its business. Tracking deal performance across locations and business types is an important part of Groupon’s business. Groupon uses a number of different tracking solutions so that it can generate internal reports, as well as offer reports to business owners.

Diversifying your bank accounts can allow you to keep funds for one investment or project in one account, while keeping another for bills and entertainment expenses. An online bank account allows you to transfer funds without having to enter a bank and often can give you competitive interest rates. These accounts also allow you to view and manage you accounts online. Opening an online bank account is a simple procedure.

With the first official purging of the microfinance sector in 2010, four years after the introduction of the microfinance policy in Nigeria, depositors of the closed banks can now heave sighs of relief as the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) has concluded payment of the first batch of depositors.

NetSuite Inc., the industry’s leading vendor of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced the latest social enterprises to benefit from a NetSuite.org product donation. NetSuite.org is NetSuite’s unique corporate citizenship program, which enables growing social enterprises to access product donations of NetSuite’s cloud-based business software service that helps deliver increased productivity, reduced operating costs, and improved organizational flexibility.

IBM unveils its fifth annual "Next Five in Five" -- a list of innovations with the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM's Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible.

Omidyar Network announced an $825,000 grant to Praekelt Foundation to support its pioneering use of mobile technology to drive positive social change. Funded through Omidyar Network's Government Transparency investment area, the grant will be used to extend the Foundation's mobile technology platforms across Africa. Built to take advantage of rapidly growing mobile penetration throughout the continent, these mobile platforms will provide the technological foundation and infrastructure for a variety of initiatives focusing on healthcare, education, human rights and government transparency initiatives.

Hughes, who left Facebook in 2007 to become the Obama campaign's director of online organizing, soft-launched Jumo last March. Jumo was designed to let users find, follow and support the causes important to them, and with 3,500 organizations on board at launch, would-be philanthropists should be able to find and follow something of interest upon joining.

Capping microfinance interest rates will hurt the poor. There are better ways to regulate the industry.

India’s microfinance industry has warned it is being pushed to the brink of collapse, as a result of a bank freeze on credit to microlenders triggered by a political crackdown. India’s commercial banks, which normally provide about $133m a week in credit to the microloan industry, have frozen those disbursals for the past two weeks, as companies wrestle with a backlash in one of their biggest markets, the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Lots of banks are getting on board with basic mobile banking this year, but there's not been too much innovation when it comes to functionality. A handful of banks are leading the way with widely available capabilities that set them apart from the pack.

Bank card issuers will be punished for collecting fees for inter-network ATM internal-network transactions that have not been approved by the State Bank of Viet Nam, said Ho Huu Hanh, a representative of the State Bank’s HCM City branch. Funds collected through these illegal fees would also be appropriated to the State budget, Hanh warned.

Thirty-five bankers and trainers from 15 institutions in Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam yesterday participated in a training programme on building sustainable small and medium-sized banking operations in HCM City.

Mobile payment users worldwide are forecast to increase 2.1 percent to 109 million by the end of 2010, a US-based research firm said in a report.

The world's major greenhouse gas emitters gathered in Washington D.C last week, trying to lay the groundwork for a global deal to fight climate change, but progress was limited. The two-day major economies meeting on climate change was meant to pave the way for international talks in Copenhagen in December, seeking to forge a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Insurers should think small to tap into one of their biggest opportunities for growth: serving poor people. The financial services industry is facing unprecedented challenges worldwide due to excessive risk-taking. Complicated investment vehicles, insufficient transparency and excessive swapping of credit default risk have had a severe and pervasive impact on confidence. The world's most advanced markets for financial services are reeling in uncertainty.

What happens when you travel to Argentina to learn how to play Polo? You start a sustainable and socially conscious shoe company. Of course... Well, that is exactly what happened to Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS shoes.

Cambodian microfinance institutions say economic crisis is taking its toll on the MFI sector and increasing the number of nonperforming loans to more than 1 percent. Microfinance lenders say the economic crisis is leading to higher rates of nonperforming loans in 2009. Last year, bad loans were just 0.67 percent of total lending.

The problems associated with borrowing from microfinance banks (MFBs) by individuals and the cost of operations of the banks will soon be a thing of the past with the coming on board of credit bureaux in the Nigerian financial institutions. Since MFBs grant loan to financially active poor without collateral, it is possible for individuals who consider themselves smart to take loan from different banks with different information.

In the face of major client protection failures in the mainstream financial sector, leaders of the microfinance industry came together this month seeking means to ensure that microfinance providers worldwide remain committed to serving their clients' best interests.

Like the consumer lenders before them, MFIs are also beginning to see the value of sharing information. Yet, credit information markets are generally in their infancy in most developing countries, and if developed, are generally quite fragmented.

Joe DiVanna writes on competitive strategies in Africa banking. To be successful, African banks must learn to think like customers, spend time with customers and ascertain how banking can be used to facilitate today’s changing African lifestyles. The key is to change our perspective on banking and payments. Where bankers see transactions, customers simply see payments.

In economics, the bottom of the pyramid is the largest, but poorest socio-economic group. In global terms, this is the four billion people who live on less than $2 per day.

Welcome to this blog about Microfinance, Innovations and Sustainable Development