What does a bank do if 75 million out of 149 million people (50%) have mobile phones, but only 19 million people (13%) have bank accounts? Monitise says the Central Bank of Nigeria has given the green light to start payments by mobile phone.

Monitise’s technology enables users to securely manage their money on their mobile phones and take advantage of a number of services including:

– Adding money to their handset’s mobile wallet or making withdrawals at a countrywide network of processing agents
– Transferring money to other people or organisations over the handset
– Obtaining their balances via SMS text alerts
– Future services will include savings, insurance and pensions

No word yet on the ability to manage multiple accounts for Advanced Fee Fraud messages. Just kidding.

Telecom growth in the developing world is calling. Aside from the fact that just about anyone can deploy a cellular service in just about any environment (OpenBTS), price/performance of mobile handsets has made them a reasonable investment. There are more users in the developing world now than the developed world, and they have brought a new set of security issues, as I’ve mentioned before.

Mobile banking will likely run into a new issues as well. How will the mobile payment systems handle a one-to-many user ratio for a mobile? A device that is shared among a family, for example, would have to be capable of multi-user account management. Likewise, a single mobile that is offered as a service to a whole village (one mobile owner allowing others to use the mobile for a fee) would have to be well-secured for multi-user data confidentiality and integrity. Mobile manufacturers and developers have been reluctant to address this in the past; they have argued it is easier/better to find a way to push more handsets into the market rather than figure out secure multi-user solutions. That may have to change as high value assets — financial account information — become common in markets with higher one-to-many user ratios.

I imagine a mobile device could be mounted in a box on the street, much like the classic British red box. Village users could step into the box and use it to do their (mobile) banking. That model certainly worked for the developed world as it developed telecommunications. Remember the party line?