Mark Pickens is a Microfinance Analyst with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a global resource center for microfinance housed at the World Bank. We published the first part of the interview here on April 4th. CGAP are arguably the most authoritative source of information about branchless banking services and are currently in the forefront of research efforts to understand and develop this market.

Mark has co-authored a global review of regulation for mobile- and other forms of branchless banking, forming an evidence base from more than 500 interviews with central bankers and executives in mobile, banking and technology industries. His work has been quoted in The Economist, The Banker and CNN.com. Prior to joining CGAP, Mark consulted with the UN, US government, commercial banks and specialized microfinance lenders.

In the first part of the interview, Mark elaborated on the most important issues as the branchless banking market evolves in complexity and size, as well as explaining why mobile phone banking is currently one of the hottest issues in the financial services sector.

In this second and final part of the interview, Mark and I explore the possible evolution of the mobile phone banking industry as it grows out of payments and remittances and into other financial services.

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A new wave of Internet connectivity for the BoP is under way by means of making the Web audible.

Internetspeech has developed a technology that makes the Internet accessible over the phone. That's right. Just a phone line and your voice; no keyboards, no screens and no literacy required.

Click here to listen to a demo while you read the rest of the post.

The model is similar in concept to Question Box, and would allow a potentially large segment of the BoP to benefit from the access to information and a global marketplace that the Web offers.

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