An exciting area of growth is mobile banking as it is accelerating the outreach of financial services at the BOP. The increasing use and diffusion rate of mobile telephony in developing countries is creating low cost alternatives for people to make deposits, remittances and payments. Smart Money and Globe’s G-Cash in the Philippines, Wizzit in South Africa and M-Pesa in Kenya are some of the innovative mobile transaction systems. Africa has witnessed a spectacular growth in mobile phone subscriptions from 15.3mn in 2000 to 198mn in 2006. The penetration rate in this period soared from 1.97% in 2000 to 21.48% in 2006! (Penetration rate of fixed lines in the same period went from 2.48% to 3.09%). CGAP is covering this area with a slightly broader scope. They have published very interesting notes on “branchless banking” which they define as “the delivery of financial services outside conventional bank branches using information and communications technologies and non-bank retail agents (merchants, supermarkets, post offices)”. The notes published so far cover India, Kenya and Pakistan. Mobile banking/branchless banking is a hot topic for 2008.