MobileWebsiteWatch

In a report from the Associated Press recently, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has struck a deal with a for-profit financial company to bring mobile banking to rural and impoverished regions of India and the Middle East. This seems like an amazing idea and I would not at all be surprised to see most major US banks start to offer similar services to cash in on migrant workers sending money to families back home and extending ther deposit bases to swaths of new account-holders.

The payoff could be big for companies providing these services. People who are now “unbanked” in China, India and Brazil alone could generate $85 billion in banking revenue by 2015, according to an estimate by the Boston Consulting Group. In January, India’s ICICI Bank Ltd., the nation’s second-largest bank, launched a mobile banking system. The State Bank of India, which has more than 100 million customers, many without Internet access

This to me really highlights how having a mobile optimized experience is an extremely effective way for companies to open up there brand to people on a mind-numbing scale. People in developing nations who are rapidly gaining wealth and will soon be buying up goods and services, cars and clothes and drugs and detergent, etc. The article points out:

Mobile banking could be another area in which the developing world leapfrogs the developed world, which is often constrained by expensive, pre-existing infrastructure. For example, countries like India and Cambodia have often skipped land lines in favor of installing mobile phone technology only…

“Today, it’s difficult to reach these people,” Obopay India Executive Director Aditya Menon said at a news conference in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. “If you solve that problem, you are enabling them to enter the economy.”

It just goes to show that the payoff and applications for mobile web technology today has barely scratched the surface.