GSMA launches Mobile Money Interoperability Test Platform for financial inclusion

The GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab is guided by a global Advisory Group which comprises GoPay, IDEMIA, KaiOS, MTN, Telenor, the University of Washington, VEON, Vodafone, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to the official press release, the role of this advisory group is to assess, prioritise, and contribute towards potential project ideas that drive financial and digital inclusion for the underserved. These initiatives include the openness and interoperability of payment systems, service accessibility for women and vulnerable user populations, digital identities for unregistered people.

Under their guidance, it was found that the rise in the need for digitisation has been accompanied by an emphasis on the need for mobile money accounts to be able to work together across different networks, also known as account-to-account interoperability. While interoperability models exist, the official press release shows that there is an increasing interest in centralised models in which financial service providers are interconnected through a central hub.

Second, enabling service providers to connect to mobile money platforms through accessible APIs allows them to build new services to address the needs of underserved user groups. The GSMA Mobile Money API initiative, an GSMA-led industry collaboration, facilitates seamlessly integrating service providers and provides an API specification for all the common mobile money use cases.