Mobile Phones Promise to Bring Banking to the World’s Poorest
The rapid proliferation of mobile platforms and the digital services that move across them are transforming the world in countless ways. Overnight, these technologies create billionaires and business models so beautifully unique and freakishly inspired that we call them “unicorns.” But perhaps no segment of the world’s population stands to benefit more from this amazing era than the roughly 2.5 billion people around the globe subsisting on less than $2 per day.
For these chronically poor people, many of whom live in rural and remote areas in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, financial services and tools have always been little more than a dream. But thanks to the boom in mobile and digital technologies, that dream is becoming a reality. And we’re seeing early signs of a promising pathway to financial stability for the world’s poorest people.
