Dialog Axiata, Sri Lanka’s leading mobile operator launched mobile money payment system yesterday with the consent of central bank, Sri Lanka. Back in 2009 LIRNEasia‘s Senior Policy Fellow Muhammad Aslam Hayat wrote about the possibility of having mobile money in Sri Lanka and LIRNEasia facilitated it. Dialog is the first operator to be licensed by Sri Lanka’s central bank to make mobile payments. “The dawn of the mobile money era in Sri Lanka has been made possible by the progressive, and financial inclusion focused, regulatory ethos of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka,” Wijayasuriya said. “In this respect Sri Lanka’s payments and settlement legislation and Mobile Payment regulations stand among the most progressive in the world.
Google has acquired a leading firm in mobile advertising, causing observers to think that mobile advertising will take off in a big way. The growing popularity of the iPhone and other powerful mobile devices ensures that mobile ads will become more ubiquitous, but predictions for the growth of the business vary widely. “We see mobile as a huge growth opportunity for us,” Susan Wojcicki, vice president for product management at Google, said in an interview. “We see an opportunity working with AdMob to really accelerate our efforts in an important industry for Google.” Google is already ahead of its rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo, in one segment of the mobile advertising business: ads linked to search queries.
One of the greatest contributions that can be made to help people pull themselves out of poverty is to facilitate safe, secure, low-cost transactions. Mobile payments which are potentially accessible to almost the entire populations of emerging economies need to be encouraged in this regard. At the beginning of the year, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka indicated it will be making policies for mobile payments. Not having seen much activity on this front, we facilitated a contribution from Muhammed Aslam Hayat, a legal expert currently based in Bangladesh but with extensive regional experience. It was published in the Financial Times, 12 July 2009.