Ignacio Mas is executive director at the Digital Frontier Institute. He is also senior fellow at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the Saïd Business School at Oxford University.
By planning payments, households can seek to stabilize their daily circumstances, develop opportunities to improve their condition in the future, and mitigate shocks that can set their families back.
Who would have expected only three years ago that banking beyond branches would be receiving so much attention across the financial services and development industries?
Branchless banking is best conceived of as the construction of a network utility. In the third of three blog posts we’ve featured this week, Ignacio emphasizes the applications of this utility for poorer customers.
In order for branchless banking to prove to be transformational, it needs to demonstrate not only that it can be scalable (priority #1), but also that it can work for a range of providers and for a range of customer segments – including the poor. These are the two next priorities for branchless banking.
It is easy to foresee that in the future normal neighborhood stores will be used by poor people everywhere to conduct basic financial transactions, that technology based on real-time communications will be used to make those transactions reliable and secure, and further that providers will increasingly rely on people’s own mobile phones rather than on deploying cards and dedicated point of sale terminals.
