In this issue:
Global MVT Index release scheduled for 16 February 2009
Take a peek under the hood of the soon to be released Mondato global MVT Index. WARNING - this is an unabashed plug for the Index. We sincerely hope you are interested.
A break in our usual fare this week as we think about the lighter side of advancements in mobile.
Reminder
Mondato will be hosting a booth at the GSMA Conference in Barcelona, February 15-19. Up close and personal with the movers and shakers in the GSM world, we will report back to you and probably even see some of you there! Call, click or come by our stand in Hall 2: 2J52. Let us know you are coming contact@mondato.com and we can plan a meeting (perhaps you like tapas?).
What's in a number?
Our Mondato Global MVT Index - a new standard for examining the potential for Mobile Value Transfer
The global march towards mobile money is inescapable. Mobile operators, banks and other financial institutions, money transfer operators, and technology and service providers are all onboard and paddling enthusiastically. With all the permutations mobile value can take, a foundational understanding of the situation of one country relative to others is needed. The global Mondato MVT Index has been conceived to bring some order to the chaos.
The terminology of MMT is common – Mobile Money Transfer. But MVT – Mobile Value Transfer – expands out beyond money to remittances of many flavours, including bill payments, mobile top-ups, banking services, and more. Our inaugural MVT Index will set the standard for investigating the potential to engage in international, inbound mobile value transfer in a country.
What it is and What it is Not
The Mondato MVT Index is a measure of the readiness of a country for success with MVT. Focused on what makes a country’s market primed in terms of international, inbound transfer, it is:
· Global – scoring over 150 countries
· Relevant and Responsive – updated quarterly or more often for this rapidly changing field
· Oriented towards helping businesses better understand their opportunities and the barriers they may face in entering a market
It is not however, all inclusive. For example, while in the African continent both Nigeria and Liberia are highly ranked on the index, both would need extremely careful consideration and planning from a legal and regulatory perspective to overcome barriers to doing business there. So, a high ranking does not automatically mean "jump in and do business here." It rather means the potential for MVT to grow and succeed is high; that the environment is ripe from the perspectives of the economic conditions, some infrastructural prerequisites, and in terms of potential volumes.
Index Drivers
There are many indicators used in the creation of this index. Grouped into factors, they represent the following signs of readiness or potential for MVT:
1. Market size – economics and volume measures
2. Infrastructure – e.g.,
a. existing utilities availability and adoption both traditional and mobile
b. supporting payment structures such as ATMs or POS
3. Stability and safety
4. Money flows – such as FDI and remittance
What can you do with it?
Use the index to understand where a country you are targeting fits in the context of other countries’ ranks and to gain a perspective on MVT globally. There are individual country reports for key countries that are also available for purchase as a supplement to the index. These go into depth in explaining the conditions relevant to MVT in the country, and can be used to help your organization plan for how it will address the particular circumstances in that country, including undertaking further research to crystallize an action plan.
The Global Index and Overview Report will be available online for an limited time introductory rate on 16 February.
Sound off: Random occurrence for this Friday the 13th?
A break in our usual fare for something "unusual"
Friday the 13th comes this week with an interesting factoid. On that day, the Unix Operating System time, which has been measured in seconds since midnight January 1st, 1970, will reach the value of 1234567890. To be precise, this will occur at 11:31:30 PM in Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.
Whereas this would seem (and probably is) a geeky thing to notice, it does remind us that as we continue to upgrade our technology, there are components that have longer useful lives than the last gadget we bought. Operating systems are one such example, information is another.
We tend to get excited about new cell phone features, and how they are going to change the way we bank, or the way we pay our bills, or remit funds across borders. But we must remember that as the cell phone penetrates larger segments of the population in ever-expanding remote areas, the challenges are a bit different. In these areas, because of prevailing economic situation, cell phones are less feature rich, need to cost less, function on narrower available bandwidths, and must even deal with the fact that power availability is less ubiquitous. Yet we see that the demand for both fundamental service levels and new features is no less robust.
The solution to the demand for features in spite of the challenges, tilts the balance of functionality back into a smart network, with simplified protocols and only moderate growth of complexity in the handheld device. Policy making bodies, especially in developing countries, need to take this into account when they decide on how to auction spectrum for new services, and what to demand from the bidders. Even in the USA, where broad bandwidth is still not available in rural areas, the FCC struggles with the same problem but from the opposite side, and should not require universal high bandwidth availability everywhere.
So as we expand service to new areas, we are back to a small footprint OS, that fits on many hardware platforms, the way Unix started, but we are now wiser, and know to leverage open source development and cheaper hardware. Now we are left to wonder what will come back to haunt us from history in another 1234567890 seconds.
