Cash is simple, portable, anonymous, easily exchangeable at an agreed value by both buyer and seller, and accepted nearly everywhere. Yet the physical nature of cash creates big transaction costs, and a wide range of security and transparency risks.

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Around the world, banks, mobile network operators, and others are using innovative ways to make financial services more accessible and affordable for the poor.

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Imagine you’re a migrant laborer living entirely in the cash economy. How do you send money home to your wife and kids? How do you buy supplies from the next town over? How do you pay utility bills?

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Today we announced that Digicel, Haiti’s leading cell phone company, won a $2.5 million prize for helping to make mobile money a reality in Haiti. Digicel’s service, Tcho Tcho Mobile (which is slang for money in Creole), is offering Haitians an alternative to long and costly trips to  pick up money sent by friends and family, waiting in long queues for salaries, or the insecurity of carrying cash. Haitians can now send, receive, and store money through their mobile phones without traveling to overcrowded banks or money transfer houses.

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When I visited Kenya last December I had a chance to observe M-PESA, which is a mobile money service that is being used by more than 13 million people for storing and transferring money.

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