Sarah Rotman Parker

Sarah Parker is a Director, working on the Center for Financial Services Innovation’s (CFSI’s) public thought-leadership. She manages CFSI’s work on financial health, making this more tangible and actionable for providers in how they serve financial consumers. Having come to CFSI from working on financial inclusion internationally, Sarah is motivated to improve the overall financial health of American consumers. Prior to joining CFSI, Sarah worked at CGAP, managing their mobile banking agenda in francophone West Africa and leading global research on electronic government payments.

By Sarah Rotman Parker

Blog

A New Meaning of “Community”: Social Media In Financial Services

Community is now being defined by many as the social knowledge that people are beginning to generate through, yep you guessed it, social media. In developed and developing countries alike, there is a growing cohort of start-ups that are leveraging information people share about themselves on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare, using this public information to provide a fuller and more accurate picture of their financial lives to potential financial providers.
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A Trip Around the Corner: Financial Inclusion in the U.S.

Here at CGAP we love to draw global lessons about financial inclusion from our interaction with stakeholders in various countries. But we often neglect learning from the latest innovations in the developed world since we assume that the differences between these countries and the ones we are most interested in are too great. Last year, a few of us attended the annual Underbanked Financial Services Forum organized by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and returned again this year to learn about the latest innovations in the U.S. market.
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From Protection to Inclusion: Shifting to Cashless Payments

All around the world, social protection is evolving into much more than a safety net for the poor. It is becoming a tool for financial inclusion and economic opportunity. Interestingly, stories like these, and the trends behind them, were barely on the radar of the global financial inclusion field three years ago when CGAP published the first official estimate of financially-inclusive G2P payments. Since then, government, donor and NGO efforts to link financial access to government payments has become a swiftly growing movement.
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How Perception and Trust Shape Adoption

How does a company, or in this case – a new player in the financial services market – change the way it is perceived among a new customer segment it is trying to reach with new products and services?
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What Do International Remittances Mean for Mobile Money?

Since remittances to developing countries were estimated at about $351 billion for 2011, capturing even a small share of this market could be a transformational opportunity for mobile money providers – right?