The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has established ?focus groups? to study the requirements for the telecommunication standards for the global adoption of mobile money and ?aviation cloud? for real-time monitoring of flight data.
The formation of the focus group in aviation cloud comes in response to the call from the minister of communications and multimedia of Malaysia, Ahmad Shabery Cheek in March 2014, urging ITU to develop standards to facilitate the transmission of flight data in real-time.
Participation in the focus group will be open to all interests, including non-members of ITU, and it will work in close collaboration with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), ICT solution providers, aircraft manufacturers, airlines and other standardization expert groups.
The new focus group will study advances in cloud computing and data analytics to develop use cases for the application of state-of-the-art data analytics and data mining techniques in real-time. It will develop technical reports to provide the foundation for standards-based aviation clouds.
In close collaboration with ICAO, the envisioned reports will address questions surrounding the type of data to be transmitted and the periodicity and reliability of its transmission, as well as the mechanisms to enable data security and privacy and the prevention of data misuse.
The reports will be the basis for the development of telecommunications standards providing security and providing interoperable and secure aviation cloud systems.
Meanwhile, the focus group on mobile money to promote financial inclusion using information and communication technologies (ICT) was created in response to a proposal from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a member of ITU’s Standardization Sector (ITU-T).
Over 2.5 billion adults do not have access to a formal bank account, most of them in developing economies. Internationally standardized ?mobile money? platforms will increase financial inclusion to the benefit of socio-economic development worldwide.
Digital financial services are capable of improving the delivery of basic financial services. Standards will drastically reduce the costs of these services to service providers and their customers, thereby opening the door to remote and underserved communities.
The group will identify the technology trends in digital financial services expected to emerge over the coming years and how the roles of various stakeholders in this ecosystem will evolve in response. In its work to pinpoint successful use cases for the implementation of mobile money in developing countries, it will pay particular attention to the associated benefits for women.
A multi-disciplinary study, the work will encompass technical requirements ? such as the required architectural frameworks for digital financial services and the security of mobile transactions ? as well as questions surrounding policy and regulation, consumer and fraud protection, and the business models able to drive sustainable growth of the nascent mobile money industry.
