The Indian Ocean island nation of Maldives is gearing up for mobile banking, having received a $7.7 million loan from the World Bank to do so. According to the BBC its an ideal place to start mobile banking with a relatively high GDP and mobile penetration (from the CIA World Factbook, GDP per capita was an estimated $4,600 last year, and back in 2006 mobile penetration was about 70 percent). Perhaps more important is the state of the banking industry, which has been consolidated under a single system to let islanders pay money in and out without traveling to their nearest branch which could be several miles away…and many people lost their life savings during the 2004 tsunami because it was “in a pillow or a tin can at home”. So the general idea is that mobile banking will give more people access to bank services.

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There’s also an interesting claim from Tom Standage, Business Editor of The Economist magazine, that “in a typical developing country, for each extra 10 percent of people with mobile phones, an extra half a percentage point is put on GDP growth a year”. There’s an audio stream of him talking about it.