NextBillion ally Chris Monasterski, editor of the excellent PSD Blog, wrote me a short e-mail this evening alerting me to the release of the 2008 Doing Business rankings.  This year marks the fifth edition of the annual rankings, which measures the ease of doing business in 178 countries worldwide.

Anyone interested in BoP business ought to pay close attention to the Doing Business reports.  After all, many companies tell NextBillion that one major impediment to launching a BoP initiative is the "business environment."  Of course, the rankings are really designed to help us understand how easy it is to create a local business in a specific country - not initiate a BoP pilot or subsidiary there.  There may be a hidden lesson in these rankings, however - if you're interested in pursuing BoP markets, your best bet might be to work with and support the local small and medium sized business community.

In any case, back to the data.  Three countries - Brunei, Liberia, and Luxembourg - are new to the rankings this year.  The methodology is largely the same, using surveys to assess the ease of startup, licensing, employment, property registration, credit, investor protection, taxes, cross-border trade, contract enforcement, and business close.  (In short - business environment, sans infrastructure and macro-level policy.)  First and last remain the same from 2007 - Singapore and Democratic Republic of Congo, respectively.

The real story, as it was last year, are the countries that are improving within the rankings.  Chris identifies Egypt as the top reformer, along with Croatia and Ghana.  Who failed to change?  Not surprisingly, Zimbabwe and Venezuela lead this ignominious group.

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Last week I attended to a conference at Chemonics International by John Owens on mobile banking (m-banking). Almost every writer on NextBillion has written blog posts about this new approach to banking. According to John Owens -chief of party for MABS from Chemonics International- m-banking is the future of micro-finance and rural banking, especially in remote areas - and many people agree. With the increase in cell phone sales in the past years, more people have cell phones and therefore banking services have a broader market base in which to operate.

The advantages of mobile banking are many. It provides a more secure way of making transactions instead of carrying cash; it facilitates transactions such as deposits and withdrawals; and it makes operations much simpler for micro-entrepreneurs.

According to Business Week, Filipinos are the text messaging kings. They send an estimation of 200 million text messages on a given day. Chemonics has been leading the program called Microenterprise Access to Banking Services funded by USAID in the Philippines and it has proven to be of great success.

The new mobile banking service that the conference was about is called G-Cash. In a nutshell: an approximately 10 dollar cell phone is turned into an "electronic wallet" that people can use to send and receive all different types of payments via text message. People in the Philippines are using G-Cash to pay bills such as utilities, school tuition, as well as to purchase goods and services and receive their salary via 'text-a-sweldo' or remittances from abroad via 'text-a-remittance.'

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