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FEATURED EVENT: Mobile Money: Technology to Transform Transactions

What if anybody with a phone could send and receive money?

What if mobile money agent services could be crowd-sourced?

And what if every mobile phone came with a full suite of financial services?

These aspirations, and the technological, economic, and behavioral challenges that accompany them, will be the focus of Mobile Money: Technology to Transform Transactions, a two-day convening on September 19th and 20th, 2013 at Berkeley.

The convening is sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and organized by the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) along with the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation (gui2de) and the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley.

Emerging technologies, especially the mobile platform, can have a transformative impact on financial inclusion. To realize this several issues need to be addressed. Clients in the informal economy need to be engaged so that they trust and value formal financial services. Products and services need to adapt to financial, social and usage preferences of an unfamiliar market – while being usable and intuitive to elicit appropriate responses within constrained design parameters. Customers need to be on-boarded using alternative modes of authentication and transactions conducted securely with limited infrastructure capacity. Data needs to be collected and synthesized to manage new distribution networks, to gauge consumer behavior and to manage risk in creative new ways.

The convening brings diverse actors working on the latest technology and delivery strategies under one roof – including service providers, solution developers, scientists and economists. It is structured as a series of workshops that address issues along the arc of service design and delivery. CEGA hopes that this will inject fresh thinking and new collaborations in the road ahead for mobile money and financial inclusion in emerging markets.

Along with keynote speaker Ignacio Mas, it will feature panelists from:

  • The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?
  • Alcatel-Lucent
  • BitCoin
  • CGAP
  • Eko
  • Equity Bank
  • Fino
  • Georgetown University
  • HaitiPay
  • ID Mission
  • IDEO.org
  • InVenture
  • Innovations for Poverty Action
  • MIT Media Lab
  • Mobile Payment Solutions (MasterCard)
  • MTN Group
  • NYU
  • Omidyar Network
  • PayActiv
  • Real Impact Analytics
  • Reboot
  • Roshan
  • Ruma
  • Safaricom
  • Skrill
  • Taggatitude
  • Telefonica Research
  • Telenor Pakistan
  • University of Washington
  • UC Irvine
  • USAID
  • Visa

The event is invitation only. For more information on CEGA or the event please email: cega@berkeley.edu.

Categories
Technology
Tags
financial inclusion