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B ACKGROUND
Microfinance is widely viewed as a potent instrument for reducing poverty, enabling the poor to accumulate assets, and reduce their vulnerability to economic stress. One of the major challenges the
industry faces in Jamaica is the cost of disbursing loans and collecting loan payments. More significantly it is the single greatest obstacle to MFIs lowering the comparatively high interest rates they charge on microloans. Another hurdle to the widespread adoption of microfinance is the difficulty in accessing rural populations. For both of these
challenges - and many others which tend to hobble the expansion of micro-financial services -- a potential solution is Mobile Money defined as monetary transactions carried out using mobile phones including mobile banking, money transfers and mobile commerce. We coin the term mobile microfinance to refer to the use of Mobile Money for lowvalue transactions and financial services for microenterprises and microsavings of the unbanked. It is now widely accepted that the low transaction costs associated with mobile networks and the ubiquity of mobile phones, mean that Mobile Money can play an important role in the accessibility of microloans for small business and financial inclusion for the poor. Furthermore,
subsequent workshop deliberations showed the following priorities: 1. Low start-up costs and service fees for MFIs and their customers; 2. Open access to services across networks on a wide range of mobile devices; 3. Integration with MFI operations without onerous additional KYC burdens. Recommendations ranged from regulating service fees across Mobile Money service offerings to a risk-based approach to regulation that would reduce KYC requirements for low-value transactions.
operations that would be required by the additional transaction security and KYC requirements of financial service delivery. The Transcel/DBJ assessment suggests that public policy for Mobile Money would be best guided by an analysis of the deployment factors that best serve economic development and broad financial inclusion objectives. The Preliminary conclusion is that the primary public policy goal should be support for a mobile microfinance infrastructure that preserves the radical cost-advantage of mobile transactions over traditional financial service delivery. Recommended is regulatory support for of a future mobile financial service infrastructure that includes the following: