Monday morning Mobile Money round-up

Here’s a Monday morning round-up of the weekends stories in mobile finances, m-payments and m-banking. Wells Fargo has created a mobile banking service for others banks. IBM has joined forces with Sybase for mobile commerce. A new body called the Alliance for Financial Inclusion plans to bring mobile money services to 50 million poor. Deutsche Bank isn’t sure where to start with mobile banking, and mobile banking is taking over transactions in Kenya.

Sybase and IBM to team up for global mobile commerce

IBM has announced that it is joining with mobile enterprise software firm Sybase to gain presence in the mobile commerce market. This comes at the same time as the launch of IBM’s Banking Framework, a sort of “do-all” platform aimed at pushing banking services and m-commerce. The two companies hope to use their reach to quickly form a global network of alliances in mobile banking.

Wells Fargo offers mobile banking… for banks

Wells Fargo has announced that Wachovia (which it bought last year) will be launching a mobile banking service for it’s “correspondent banking” customers. For those who are curious, a correspondent banking customer is a foreign bank that provides its services through Wachovia in a given country. This allows the foreign bank to offer financial services without the expense of actually having to set up in that country. Now Wachovias correspondent banks will be able to check their information, balances, account postings and transaction through their mobiles.

Mobile cash transfer is taking over transactions in Africa

Research firm Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) has found that almost 50% of all money transfers in Kenya are now taking place via mobile banking. Mobile money services launched in Kenya two years ago with M-Pesa, and 90% of mobile banking users say they were attracted to it by the speed, convenience and lower transaction costs. This has hit the Postal Corporation ofKenya the hardest, with the use of its money order service dropping to almost nothing.

Huge international program plans to bring mobile banking to the poor

Today sees the first meeting of a new body called the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI). The Alliance includes central bank officials from 60 countries, including Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East. The organisation has been created to come up with ways to bring mobile banking services to over 50 million “un-banked” people living in poverty around the world over the next four years. According the AFI, over 2.5 billion people are unable to access basic banking services.

Deutsche Bank announces interest in mobile banking to FinanceAsia

Werner Steinmueller, Deutsche Bank’s head of global transaction banking has revealed that Deutsche Bank is definitely interested in investing in mobile banking. But he also showed that DB is not yet confident enough in the area to dive in yet: “Another area of interest and one that is absolutely new is all the products and services surrounding mobile payments. Here we are developing a whole range of products but we don’t know where the market is going yet and are looking at a lot of possibilities.”

From FinanceAsia interview