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.
With a few exceptions, the road to implementing mobile banking is littered with discontinued mobile banking projects, failed new technology vendors, and shelved deployment plans.
Access to financial services—whether in the form of savings, payments, credit, or insurance—is a fundamental tool for managing a family’s well-being and productive capacity.
Branchless banking has great potential to extend the distribution of financial services to poor people who are not reached by traditional bank branch networks; it lowers the cost of delivery, including costs both to banks of building and maintaining a delivery channel and to customers of accessing services (e.g., travel or queuing times).
In this paper we put forth a vision in which people are able to make small deposits into their bank account through a variety of cash handling outlets right in their neighborhood.
Most banks in Peru have tended to use banking agents fundamentally to shift low-value transactions away from the more costly branch channel and to extend the reach of their existing branches.
