Mobiile banking takes off in poorer countries

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/innovations_in_mobile_banking.html

"Poor countries are jumping ahead of rich ones by building a 21st century infrastructure (because they have little legacy infrastructure to begin with). For example, India has leapfrogged from no land-line telephones to the latest in wireless telephony. That revolution, in turn, is causing India to leapfrog brick-and-mortar banking to wireless banking for the masses. We see similar patterns in other poor countries as well. Mobile money transfer in Africa, M-Pesa, is a case in point. Counterintuitive as it may seem, poor countries may be ahead of rich countries in mobile banking."

This is pretty cool. Poorer countries didn't have established banks that would fight to stay in business, so there was no pushback on developing mobile banking.  Maybe we'll get such a system some day.