Interesting story today on the BBC about a move to make mobile banking the primary customer banking system in the Maldives. With support from the World Bank all the banks are being brought together in the one system to drive adoption of mobile banking in the islands, “as an experiement” to set up credit facilities for the locals and in turn to drive GDP growth.
Tom Standage, Business Editor of The Economist magazine, says that mobile banking has been a major success story in the developing world and is in fact ahead of the developed world. He explained that in a typical developing country, for each extra 10% of people with mobile phones, an extra half a percentage point is put on GDP growth a year.
Its worth listening to the audio of Tom explaining this link between growth of mobiles and GDP growth in developing countries. The audio link is embedded within the story.
