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Consumer Insights into Disclosure

Disclosure and pricing transparency are important building blocks for countries looking to develop effective consumer protection regimes. They also are of particular importance for low-income populations, who often have lower levels of literacy and numeracy, and limited experience with formal financial products.

Can Brazil’s Agents Provide a Wider Range of Services?

The prevailing wisdom about Brazil’s vast agent network (largest in the world, 4x that of Kenya and the Philippines combined!) is that it is used mainly for bill payments. This network appears to be a missed opportunity to also make credit, savings, and other products available to low-income people in an affordable way. Is this channel being underutilized for poor people?

Branchless Banking and Microinsurance: A Perfect Marriage?

In previous blogs Mark Pickens has lamented the lack of innovation by branchless banking providers in products that go beyond payments. But there are some green-shoots of innovation. In this blog we take a look at some examples of early experiments that we have seen involving in micro-insurance.

Commercial Investment Landscape in Branchless Banking

This blog post summarizes a quick review of commercial investments in mobile financial services and branchless banking. We focused our review on equity deals between 2005 and 2010 involving mobile payment companies, agent companies, payment platforms and others providers that we knew were targeting the financially excluded in developing countries.

Familias en Acción: A Financial Inclusion Strategy

In this post, our guest bloggers discuss the Government of Colombia’s efforts to use Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs as a gateway to financial inclusion.

GCASH Supports the Philippine Government’s Programs

Globe Telecom is a leading telecommunications company in the Philippines that runs the GCASH mobile money service.

Branchless Banking, G2P and Large Volume Payments

As branchless banking services reach the scale needed to be able to serve large segments of the population of a country, they are starting to strike partnerships with governments, businesses and not-for-profit organizations that need to make payments to large numbers of people.

Borderless Branchless Banking

Are international remittances the final frontier for branchless banking? Formal remittance flows to developing countries are estimated to be US $325bn in 2010: in some countries these flows outweigh overseas development aid and constitute a sizeable proportion of the economy – international remittances equal 12% of GDP in the Philippines.

Getting Beyond Payments

Most branchless banking services help clients move money over distance : a money transfer to a family member in the countryside, a bill payment to the utility company, a social benefit from the government.

Highlights from the CGAP Technology Blog – October 2010

The launch of TigoPesa in Tanzania was the headline on our blog starting in October.

Branchless Banking 2010: Is the Hype Justified?

After several years of very high profile attention on mobile money and other branchless banking schemes, we think it’s time to test the hype. Or more accurately, we’ve wanted to for awhile.

Mobile Banking for Those with No Mobile

Safaricom’s M-Pesa is now so well known in the mobile banking world that it has come to be accepted by some as a blueprint for mobile financial services. The service relies on the phone in the hands of the customer (now more than 12 million) to perform transactions and the phone in the hands of the agent (all 20,000 of them) to credit and debit accounts.

Microinsurance Momentum in the Philippines

Over a hundred practitioners gathered in Manila on Friday, October 1 for a consultation on the new “Roadmap for Financial Literacy on Microinsurance,” an action plan prepared by a Technical Working Group comprised of all the key stakeholders from government, the microfinance and cooperative sectors and the insurance industry.

How Can Microfinance Take Advantage of Mobile Banking?

A wide gulf separates those institutions that are in countries with existing m-banking services and those that are not.

So How Exactly Do We Regulate Microfinance?

When it comes to prudential regulation – or safeguarding deposits – the stakes are particularly high. In microfinance, most MFIs aren’t big enough to threaten the health of the financial systems they’re part of if they run into trouble.