The University of California, Irvine received a $1.7 million donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create an institute focused on the growing use of cell phone technology in providing banking and financial services to people in developing countries.
The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion will explore how the world’s poorest people spend, store and save money and how these habits are affected by the mobile banking industry.
The institute will fund research in developing countries, host conferences and provide scholarships to researchers.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will provide funding for the institute through 2011, according to the university.
“We need to understand ways that the poor think about and use money so that new banking models can become relevant for the population with the most need,” said Amolo Ng’weno, senior program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor Initiative.
Many people in the poorest countries have access to cell phones but few have access to banks.
As a result, a number of new mobile technology-based money and payment systems have emerged, according to Bill Maurer, UC Irvine anthropologist and institute director.
The interest in mobile banking and new money and payment systems that use information and communication technology hasn’t been met with an increase in academic research, Maurer said.
“While there is increasing activity in the (mobile-banking) industry, there is surprisingly little known about the impact of these new systems,” he said.
The institute, which will be housed in UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences, officially launches today.
