Mobile payment service provider Obopay and Nobel Prize winning Dr. Yunus’s micro-finance firm Grameen Solutions, have tied up for a mobile banking initiative. The Bank A Billion initiative proposes to bring banking services to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2018. The initiative will start initially in Mumbai and Bangladesh beginning October, 2008. Services includes access to savings, money transfer, payments and micro-credit.

US based Obopay had recently concludd a $20 million fourth round of investment led by India’s Essar Communications amongst many others. James Pearce, at mocoNews had mentioned that Obopay wants to become the Western Union/PayPal of the mobile world, and in order to do that it had to get 41 licenses to become a registered money transfer agent just in the US.

We had recently covered RBI putting a halt on mobile banking services. Further to the same, a Paymate spokesperson recently informed us that all was business as usual since they were compliant with the proposed set of guidelines. The final guidelines are expected by end of August, which leaves plenty of time for the initiative to adhere to the final set of guidelines.

As an aside, Grameen Telecom (GTC) is a non-profit company that provides mobile phones to villagers in Bangladesh. It’s sister concern, Grameenphone, is a GSM-based cellular operator with more than 50% of market share with 10 million customers as of Dec 2006.

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