The Newest Player in Mobile Money Is a Bakery

This morning the World Bank hosted a panel on mobile money, the set of phone-based technologies that could bring basic financial services to the world’s poorest people. It’s a big deal, and the panel predictably featured Chidi Okpala of Bharti Airtel, a mobile provider in sub-Saharan Africa, Kamal Quadir, the chief executive of bKash, a Bangladeshi mobile money provider, and other obvious players. The surprise panelist, however, was Hortensia Contreras Torres, who runs electronic services for Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo, one of the largest baking companies in the world.

That’s “baking,” not “banking.”