Listers, The Business Daily is reporting that CBK will require telcos to open independent subsidiaries to handle the cash remittance function complete with a separate management structure and keeping separate books of account for the payment service division. Now this does not go as far as introducing the carrier neutral mobile money service we need but maybed hand in hand with the new rules will be a requirement to these services to "TALK" seamlessly with each other and with other payments systems and banks the way different banks transact with one another. Secondly, I think it should be a wake up call to Safaricom to OPEN M-Pesa to allow third parties to run away with new innovations with a standard API or standard protocols for interfacing with the service without having to require Safaricom's assessment of whether the service is viable or not or even taking part in profit sharing. As great a pioneering product Safaricom has brought, one thing is for sure, the Brains at Safaricom House cannot match those of the thousands of IT kids coming out of school daily and the logical thing is to let others now come up with innovations that ride off M-PESA independently. Otherwise, Kenya may be the global leader in Mobile money transfers, but if we do not allow our kids to make the next great products by opening these systems to them now, we will rue it later when the Paypal of mobile money or the Ebay of mobile money is invented and popularized in another country and we will hear of how Silicon Valley has produced yet another Billionaire riding a product we could have come up with years before. Regards James http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/CBK-seeks-mobile-firm-subsidiaries/-/5395...