At the University of California, Irvine, south of Los Angeles, researchers had just begun thinking about the collision between mobiles and money. Founded that same year, the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) was in the process of supporting its first set of research projects, in countries ranging from Nigeria to Indonesia. When it funded its first cohort of 17 researchers from around the world in 2009, only a handful were exploring the expansion of mobile money technology. Three of the projects were in sub-Saharan Africa–in Kenya, Botswana and Nigeria. The other projects focused largely on alternative currencies, informal savings practices, programs. Five years later, in 2014, almost all of IMTFI projects involved research on mobile money, and 50% were being conducted in countries in Africa.