Now everyone, most especially private individuals without access to banking services, can open an account and have a simple and safe method of payment… Lemon Way solutions already enable millions of users to do their shopping (food, taxis etc) and transfer money to their friends and families…

Mobile network O2 has launched a smartphone app that allows users to transfer up to £500 via text message. It also allows customers to "digitise" their debit and credit cards to speed up purchases from online stores. The firm also intends to allow users of phones with near-field communication (NFC) chips to make contactless payments in high street shops.

At Mobile World Congress 2012, Amdocs, a leading provider of customer experience systems, today announced the launch of Amdocs Mobile Payments. The new solution is a cloud-based gateway, enabling mobile operators to quickly, securely and cost-effectively scale their mobile payments business for both prepaid and postpaid customers to open new revenue streams. Mobile payments that are charged via the carrier offer consumers the convenience of charging purchases directly to their mobile phone bill, prepaid balance or mobile wallet.

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.

Western Union's (WU) business model remains sound. With market fears on this issue driving a low valuation on the stock, investors have a good opportunity to invest in a fundamentally attractive business.

Collecting the monthly subscriptions for her co-operative has always been a headache for Thelma Nare, 41. This is because Nare lives in Tshitshi, Plumtree in rural Zimbabwe, about 60 kilometres away from the humdrum of the nearest town centre where banks are located. "We meet after a long time as here in the rural areas our homesteads can be very far from each other. So members of our club do not meet or contribute regularly," Nare said.

Is mobile banking worth chasing? 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.

The honeymoon with microfinance is over. Since the idea of lending or giving very small sums of money to poor people was introduced to the world by the pioneering Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the approach has been taken up by many non-governmental organizations, donor agencies and the United Nations as an essential part of their poverty-reduction efforts. Microfinance has provided countless people with access to financial services.

Visa Europe in cooperation with Visa Inc. today issued a set of mobile acceptance security best practices for software and hardware providers, retailers and their acquirers. These best practices form part of Visa Europe’s ongoing strategy to advance security measures to help protect cardholder and account data when using consumer mobile devices such as smart phones to facilitate the acceptance of card payments.

Sprint Nextel Corp. plans to start a service this year that will allow customers to make purchases with their mobile phones, ahead of a similar initiative from rivals Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA.

Electronic payment provider VeriFone has a front seat for what it calls the “gold rush for NFC” – the race to deliver products and services related to Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.

Breakthrough: Mastercard has created a card that can display your balance and even talk to you, while also doubling as a reward card.

Yankee Group research shows that while mobile transaction usage is growing, consumers show little willingness to pay for these services. The company's forecasts predict unprecedented growth in mobile transactions worldwide, with the total value of global mobile transactions increasing from $162 billion in 2010 to $984 billion in 2014. However, Yankee Group's consumer survey results show that less than 10 percent of respondents would be willing to pay extra for mobile transaction services such as mobile banking, mobile coupons and mobile payments.

Financial inclusion is a generic problem that affects most developing countries, where the proportion of unbanked is very high. It is, therefore, unsurprising that inclusion models have been deployed in various forms in many countries. Some, of course, have done better than others and we shall also subsequently explore a few models abroad to learn from what they have done right. India has had a fair number of initiatives in the Financial Inclusion space, and we cover a select few of them that are involved in m-banking and cards-issuance.

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.

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.

Claudia McKay and Mark Pickens from CGAP have pulled together a comprehensive global pricing study on banking services targeting poor, unbanked and underbanked people in Africa, Asia and Brazil. The study examines pricing for services targeting unbanked and underbanked poor people in 10 countries. The conclusion: mobile banking and other forms of branchless banking are cheaper than traditional banking, but the gap between the two may not be as wide as some may think.

The recent controversy surrounding the microfinance sector has entirely eclipsed the fact that it is the first effort in India to have delivered financial services to remote corners of the country in a self-sustaining manner. The stakes are high for India’s poor, and we have to pave the way for orderly growth in the sector. Here is our view on some key issues that have featured in the current debate.

Lyon created a system to bring formal financial services to microfinance institutions and poor entrepreneurs via a mobile phone. He believes the new software, to be launched by the organization he founded, FrontlineSMS:Credit, could change the world of microfinance by changing the way the poor interact with the institutions.

Newton Microfinance Institution is the leading private financial institution in Lao PDR. Their vision is to make sure that every Lao resident not only has access to but also benefits from the financial blessings globally enjoyed. They are installing Internet banking services to their clients in several languages including Lao, English, french, etc.

Consumer groups are applauding moves by the National Australia Bank (NAB) that are set to save credit card customers up to hundreds of dollars a year. "There are plenty of other tricks and traps with credit cards that need to be ironed out and we would invite the others to do likewise - move before regulation comes in." Whether or not they do is likely to be watched closely by the holders of the more than 16 million credit cards currently on issue in Australia.

Online retailers are spending too much time and money dealing with card not present payments, a new study has found. “It is surprising that UK merchants are still opting to continue with manual reconciliation and patchwork payment systems.”

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.

Consumers in the Netherlands will be using smartphones as mobile wallets within two years as result of a joint venture between top banks and mobile operators.

Welcome to this blog about Microfinance, Innovations and Sustainable Development