Vodafone India has partnered with ICICI Bank to launch the M-Pesa mobile money transfer and payment service in India. It’s estimated that approximately 700 million people in the country have no access to conventional banking.

M-Pesa was first launched in Kenya in 2007, allowing customers to send and receive small amounts of money on mobile phones.

A new report from Juniper Research says ‘direct carrier billing’ - enabling consumers to charge purchases to their mobile phone account - could transform the mobile content market. It’s found that third-party content providers with direct carrier billing have seen a five to six-fold increase in conversion rates compared with credit card billing.

In addition, average transaction values are also higher.

Mark Bridge writes:

We’re back from Mobile World Congress – and what a show it was. Located at a new site that saw more visitors than ever before, the show had everything… except any particularly obvious theme from hardware manufacturers. Last year was the year of the quad-core smartphone, this year there was plenty of incremental innovation but nothing truly startling.