Blog

Avoiding Common Pitfalls Along the Journey to Open APIs

Payments providers can grow revenues by allowing third-parties to create apps that leverage digital payment platforms, but the potential for reward comes with risk. Taking a "maturity model" approach can help providers avoid common pitfalls.

Flexible Finance: What Can We Learn from PAYGo Lenders?

Pay-as-you-go solar lenders have developed a uniquely flexible financial product that benefits low-income customers with erratic incomes.

Making Digital Payments Work for Low-Income Farmers

From hurling sacks of money out of planes to transporting cash in armored cars, the methods used to pay farmers in Uganda can be unsafe and inefficient. So why haven't digital payments taken off?

More than Human ATMs: The Potential of Empowered Agents

Using mobile technology to empower agents to do more than collect payments, a Senegalese agridealer grew sales, cut costs and made its customers happier.

Merchant Payments: What About the Customers?

Shifting retail payments away from cash to digital instruments will require strong buy-in from end customers, who tend to like cash. How might they be persuaded?

In Kenya, Bank Accounts Again More Popular than M-PESA – Why?

Bank accounts today once again outnumber mobile money accounts in Kenya -- by over 30 percent. Innovations like PesaLink have helped banks achieve this growth, showing that banks can thrive in the face of mobile money.

Digital Innovations in Smallholder Agricultural Insurance

Fewer than 1 percent of smallholder farmers in Africa have agricultural insurance. Digital technologies, such as satellite imaging, could greatly expand access to insurance in Africa and around the world.

Merchant Acquiring: Why Winning Is the Wrong Approach

Competition is heating up among digital financial services providers looking to stake a dominant position in the $35 trillion global retail payments market. But this could be a market where cooperation will be as important as competition for success.

Want Your Customers to Save More? Use Behavioral Economics

A behavioral economics experiment in Tanzania increased customers' savings by up to 11 percent using SMS messages about the balances of better savers.

Will Digital Payments Unlock Financial Access for Small Business?

Bundling digital payments with services that address common challenges for merchants could expand access to finance for small businesses.

From Data to Customer Insights: 3 Tips for Providers

Financial services providers often struggle to manage the vast amounts of data their customers generate. Here are three tips for providers looking to get the most out of their data.

Mapping Africa’s Latest Innovations in Digital Finance

CGAP received nearly 200 proposals from digital financial services providers across Africa interested in piloting new products. A look at those proposals — from 30 countries — shows that innovations are spreading beyond hot spots like Kenya.

A $1.5 Trillion Tip on Cracking Merchant Payments

The card industry once faced a challenge in retail payments familiar to today’s mobile money providers: competitors were building their own acceptance networks, limiting the usefulness of their services. The card industry’s solution could hold a valuable lesson for today.

Stuff Matters: Rethinking Value in Asset Finance

What's the value of lighting a home? For many low-income pay-as-you-go solar customers, it is not necessarily about saving money or generating income.

The Secret Life of Mobile Money Pricing

Mobile money fees are often viewed as a barrier to financial inclusion, but they can play an important role in building healthy markets for digital financial services.

A Mobile Money App That Helps Poor Customers Strategize

A mobile money app prototyped by CGAP has customizable features, such as image-based wallets, that allow customers to personalize the app and be their own financial strategists.

Digital Credit: Data Sharing Can Improve Product Diversity

In a CGAP and M-Kopa pilot in Kenya, customers with greater control over their credit histories took up more credit and were more likely to pay it off in full.

Regulatory Sandboxes: Potential for Financial Inclusion?

Regulatory sandboxes are now being used to spur FinTech innovations in 18 countries. What impact could these new regulatory tools have on financial inclusion going forward?

How to Transform Agent Banking with an Agent-Centric Approach

What happens when financial services providers begin thinking of agents as customers? Follow the story of AMK, a microfinance institution in Cambodia, as it embarks on this journey.

No Inclusion Without Customer Empowerment

Customer research and work with financial services providers across Africa and Asia show that customers are looking for four things when they engage with finance: choice, respect, voice and control.