LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE MONEY SUMMIT 2011: Chris Locke, Executive Director of the GSMA’s Development Fund, opened the fourth annual Mobile Money Summit this morning with a call for the industry to push NFC services beyond early launches and maximise the technology’s potential.

Citing recent commercial launches by Orange in France and efforts in South Korea to ensure service interoperability, Locke stated: “This is a service that only works when we work together. If we don’t seize this opportunity and work together we will be usurped by other parties… A year from now it would be great to be able to talk about mass scale of NFC deployments and the role NFC can play in mobile money transaction.”

Elsewhere in his opening address Locke highlighted the “growing maturity” of the mobile money market, with the East Asian market alone forecast to be worth US$3.6 billion by 2015. He pointed to 90 deployments around the world, one-third of which are in Asia. However, he warned that “with this potential comes great responsibility.” Locke argued that the sector still needs better collaboration between operators – stating that “it’s only by working together and learning from each other that we can maximise potential” – as well as operators and banks, while positive regulatory support remains critical to success.

Finally, Locke talked up the progress of the GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) programme. “It’s had a successful three years, supporting twenty deployments around the world. In the next phase, which we hope to announce soon, we’ll take the learnings beyond how you manage an agent network and scale a mobile money service in a developing country."