I recently attended mCommerce Pakistan held at the Marriot in Karachi on the 11 March. The event was organised well with a big audience and a lot of interest in the presentations. It was clear that the initiatives taken by the Central Bank to define the deployment of branchless banking have an impact in stimulating mobile banking initaitives.Although the title of the conference indicated a much wider topic (mobile commerce - which typical should include advertising, LBS, mobile TV and entertainment and much more - see my recent blog), almost all the discussion and presentations focussed on mobile banking. This was of course very satisfying as I believe that mobile banking is fundamentally at the heart of mobile commerce.
The other factor that was very interesting for me, was the number of banks that were represented at the event. One usually see mobile operators and players in the telecommunication industry attend mobile Commerce events. Atthis conference many of the attendees (but also speakers) were from banks.