At the 2010 Leadership Forum for mobile network operators and financial regulators in Rio de Janeiro, one attendee made a provocative suggestion during a discussion about operator-bank partnerships: “The premise of partnership is a premise. A bank could just be a service provider… and that may be the role in which they’re most comfortable.”
Take, for example, Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA), which is the institution which held the combined value of all agent and customer accounts for Safaricom’s M-PESA, the most famous mobile money service in the world. For CBA, the M-PESA float account is simply a deposit account—albeit a high-transaction-volume one, on which it earns very significant transactional revenues. In this case, the operator-bank relationship is simple—CBA provides a service to Safaricom—and consequently straightforward to manage….

Read more: http://mmublog.org/global/are-relationships-between-banks-and-operators-to-offer-mobile-money-for-the-unbanked-real-partnerships/