GSMA launches mobile money interoperability test platform

7th August 2020

By: Natasha Odendaal

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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A year after the launch of the GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab, an industry collaboration established to drive innovation in inclusive technologies for the underserved, GMSA has unveiled the Mobile Money Interoperability Test Platform (ITP), which aims to help make transactions more seamless in emerging markets.

The new platform will help shift the mobile money industry to a “higher gear”, where customers can pay merchants and transfer money without having to consider which mobile money provider they are using.

This end-to-end interoperability can provide more people with access to financial services and enable new services to address the needs of the most underserved user groups.

“To truly transform the financial lives of all citizens, mobile money must become a primary monetisation mechanism, universally available across a greater range of digital transactions,” says GSMA mobile for development head Max Cuvellier.

The development of mobile money into a more central role in the financial lives of users will unlock greater financial inclusion, economic empowerment and economic growth.

“For over a decade, mobile money has been driving financial inclusion, opening access to digital transactions and giving people the tools to better manage their financial lives,” he explains, highlighting that, currently, there are more than one-billion registered mobile money accounts globally, spread across 290 mobile money deployments that are live in 95 countries.

In 2019/20, more than 50.7-million new mobile money accounts were opened in Africa, taking the total number of registered accounts in the region to 481-million.

The total transaction volume and value for mobile money accounts during this period was 24-billion and $461-billion respectively, representing respective increases of 20% and 27%.

The GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab, guided by an advisory group, found that a rapid rise in the need for digitalisation had been accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the need for mobile money accounts to be able to work together across different networks, also known as account-to-account interoperability.

“We are pleased to support the ITP as a shared industry resource to accelerate the design of digital payment systems that benefit the poor, including the 1.7-billion people, globally, who do not have access to formal financial services,” says Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation financial services for the poor deputy director Kosta Peric.

While there are several interoperability models, there is increasing interest in centralised models in which financial service providers are interconnected through a central hub.

“The platform empowers both third-party service providers and digital financial service providers to test their software implementation in an end-to-end ecosystem,” says GSMA inclusive fintech for mobile money director Bart-Jan Pors.

“It solves complex testing scenarios through the simulation of the different ecosystem entities, the different application programming interfaces (APIs) and different use cases.”

Enabling service providers to connect to mobile money platforms through easily accessible APIs allows them to build countless new services to address the needs of underserved user groups.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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