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"M-Pesa, Africa's most successful fintech, is celebrating its 15th anniversary, having grown to connect more than 50 million customers and nearly half a million businesses across seven countries. M-Pesa now processes more than 61 million transactions a day, making it Africa's largest fintech provider, and it has attracted 42,000 external developers to create additional services for the platform. Whichever way you look at it: Wow."

VODACOM Tanzania in partnership with Amana Bank has launched a new M-Pesa mobile service dubbed "Halal Pesa" to reach out to the Muslim population who are excluded in the current mobile money services.

Under the deal, M-Pesa's 24 million users and 173,000 local merchants will be linked to Visa's 61 million merchants and its more than 3 billion cards. The mobile phone-based M-Pesa will serve as a virtual card, allowing users to make payments abroad when they travel and also letting them transfer cash from their Visa-linked debit cards to their M-Pesa wallet even when they are abroad.

Quote of the day from Noelle Acheson, Head of Market Insights at Genesis Trading: "digital money is great except for when they decide to switch it off for a while", as M-Pesa shuts down for four hours for scheduled maintenance! Systemically important payment systems must have offline rails!

Tigo Tanzania launched a service that allows all Tigo Pesa customers to send and receive cash on their mobile money wallets from M-PESA in Kenya, MTN in Uganda and MTN and Airtel in Rwanda.

Vodafone plans to transform its M-Pesa African mobile payments service into a financial platform spanning the continent as it seeks to unlock the value of one of the world's largest fintech networks.

The Kenya Information Communications (Amendment) Bill, 2019 is seeking the registration of mobile money services as separate business units. It would compel the telecommunications regulator to ensure that mobile money services are licensed as banks.

Vodafone is no longer part of the Libra consortium. Vodafone will dedicate resources previously intended for Libra to its well-established and successful digital payment service M-Pesa, which the company plans to expand beyond the six African nations currently served.

Regulatory sandboxes, modeled after what Kenyan regulators effectively did in the early stages of M-PESA, would provide an excellent opportunity for regulators to experiment with removing barriers to entry to nontraditional financial service providers and relaxed KYC-AML laws. It's difficult to predict with any confidence what innovations will emerge in this environment and achieve the most success. But if Africa's incredible success with mobile money is any indicator, the benefits of this enabling approach make it well worth the try.

USSD also has its limitations. The customer experience is not as smooth nor does it offer the same security capabilities as STK or mobile internet. Further, USSD sessions can be dropped, potentially raising costs and harming customer trust. Despite these and other challenges, the majority of leading MFS providers rely on USSD, including many MNOs. Large deployments that rely primarily on USSD include bKash in Bangladesh, WING in Cambodia, EasyPaisa in Pakistan, ZAAD in Somaliland, M-PESA and Tigo in Tanzania, and EcoCash in Zimbabwe.

Mobile money isn't the one easy fix to global poverty - there's no such thing - but it is an extraordinarily simple tool that works remarkably well. And yet, a decade after it first took off, it remains in many places underutilized. The evidence base for it is significantly stronger than the evidence base for popular financial access interventions like microloans. And there's a great deal the global development community could do to make it more possible in the countries where it hasn't taken off, from helping governments develop fair and limited regulation and taxation frameworks to directly dispersing money to people through mobile money systems. That sort of work isn't flashy, but it lays the groundwork for a world where everyone can save, send, and spend money from their phones - and that, the evidence suggests, can make a really big difference.

To get started, new Worldcoin users are asked to download the World App onto their smartphones, scan a QR code, and face the orb to scan both irises. This generates a hash known as IrisHash on the Ethereum-based Optimism blockchain and a digital ID, which Worldcoin touts as a unique way to verify an individual's personhood, avoiding risks of AI-driven fraud. Signing up instantly earns users one Worldcoin (WLD), but after the cryptocurrency was listed in several crypto exchanges, including Binance, new users were rewarded with 25 extra coins. As at July 31, 26 coins equaled $59.

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has resumed charges for mobile money and bank account transactions. Transaction charges were stopped in 2020 to facilitate the use of mobile money during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the CBK resumes charges, they will be significantly lower than before the pandemic.