@MWC: Gates Foundation earmarks $12.5M for m-banking

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $12.5 million to back an effort to bring cheap mobile financial services to people in developing markets.
The Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) program seeks to work with carriers, banks, microfinance institutions, government and development organizations to overcome barriers in deploying m-banking services to the reported 1 billion users worldwide who have a mobile phone but no bank account. The initiative aims to support roughly 20 projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America with the goal of reaching 20 million previously unbanked people with mobile financial services by 2012.
“Traditional financial services are often too costly and inconvenient for people who earn less than $2 a day to obtain, and too expensive for banks to provide,” said Bob Christen, director of the Financial Services for the Poor initiative at the Gates Foundation. “Technology like mobile phones is making it possible to bring low-cost, high-quality financial services to millions of people in the developing world so they can manage life’s risks and build financial security.”