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4b) Mobile Money for the Unbanked Award

This brand new award aims to recognise innovative mobile banking services around the world that are pioneering the roll out of low-cost financial services for millions of people, where traditional financial services are not within their reach or readily available.

The award is aligned to the GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) initiative, which was created to connect the unconnected and improve the social, economic and environmental well-being of the world’s population living on less than US$2 a day by supporting and encouraging the development of sustainable mobile money solutions.

Please note: entries for Mobile Money Services targeted at higher income segments, i.e. International remittances, mobile payments, mobile ticketing etc should enter category 3c Best Mobile Money Service.

The purpose of the GSMA’s initiative is to accelerate the availability of mobile money services for financially underserved segments of society, in terms of speed of deployment, the achievement of scale and the creation of a variety of platforms - from individual platforms enabling cash transfers to the enabling of interoperable savings, credit and insurance services, for example.

The MMU Award category will recognise the mobile money service or application that has had the most significant impact on unbanked customers in developing markets over the last year, and which supports the goals of the GSMA’s MMU programme.

The judges will shortlist four to six entries in this category, with one winner announced at the world’s leading mobile communications event, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday 16th February 2010.

Eligibility:

Entry is open to all players in the mobile money ecosystem targeting the ‘unbanked’ in developing markets. The GSMA recognises the early stage of development for many of these services and therefore welcomes entries for products and services that are either commercially available today, as well trials and pilots, providing trials involve 1,000 or more users. Solutions that have been developed as a result of partnerships between operators and financial institutions are welcomed as joint entries.

All entries must be submitted by Monday 23rd November 2009 (5pm GMT).

Judging criteria

Entries can be submitted for products or services that are either commercially available, in trial, soft launch or pilot phase (providing pilots exceed more than 1,000 users). Entries for the Best Mobile Money for the Unbanked category will be judged on the following main criteria:

Judges will be looking for entries that:

Specific Entry Form Questions for this category:

On the entry form, in addition to submitting contact and company information, you will be asked to answer the following questions (maximum text/character length for your answers also shown in brackets below):


Please note: Use URLs when they are specific/ relevant to the category and will help judges further understand your entry, but due to the number of entries received, judges will not have time to surf company websites looking for further information on the entered product/service or initiative.