60% of the world’s population have no access to banking services, although 85% have a mobile phone.

Brett King, founder of the first mobile banking service in the U.S. and the UK, and specialist in innovation in financial services, was at the XII Latin American Congress on banking automation, which is being held in Panama. He states that the key “to popularize and expand banking services to all sectors of the population is the use of mobile technology, especially since the advent of smart phones.”

An article in Prensa.com reports that “the speaker presented several mobile banking initiatives that are changing traditional paradigms in the industry. One is the African M-Pesa, a service for making payments and sending money through cell phones without using branches which has become popular in Kenya. King predicts a change in consumer habits, which will be more evident with the younger generation, for whom mobile environments are natural. Giorgio Trettenero, general secretary of the Latin American Federation of banks, shared the importance of mobile phones as a means of providing services and the growth of electronic transactions.

He also emphasized the need for regulation in order to ensure the safety of these operations and processes that ‘go hand in hand’ with banking”.

Source: Prensa.com