Luis Buenaventura is Head of Product at Satoshi Citadel Industries, a Bitcoin startup operating out of the Philippines. It’s a little known fact that_mobile money was effectively invented in the Philippines_by Smart Communications. Its_Smart Money_solution, launched in 2001, predates the successful M-Pesa out of Kenya by a good six years. Even_GCash, a similar service operated by the second largest telco in the Philippines, was launched three years before Safaricom’s pride and joy in 2004. But although M-Pesa is clearly the runaway hit of the mobile money platforms (31 percent of Kenya’s GDP_is spent on the back of their system), other...

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