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bKash Bangladesh: What Explains its Fast Start?

bKash is the fastest growing provider of mobile financial services in Bangladesh, having registered 11 million accounts in just 30 months. Several factors have combined to help bKash be an early success in a relatively new market.

Transforming Payments through mPOS: Perspectives from Indonesia

For traditional merchants in Indonesia, cash is still a mainstay of doing business. CGAP and partners set out to understand what might motivate more merchants to use digital forms of payment, particularly mobile point-of-service (mPOS) devices.

Financial Inclusion in Cambodia is Trending Digital

In Cambodia, where 80% of the population lives in rural areas and fewer than 20% of adults have access to financial services, digital finance could be a financial inclusion game-changer.

YouthStart: Training Banks to Serve Young Customers

Youth have become a core concern in many African economies, yet most financial institutions are not equipped to address them as real potential customers.

Analyzing the Business Case for Youth Savings

Serving young clients can be difficult for banks driven by short-term profit goals. But capturing the youth market can help give financial service providers a competitive edge in the long-run.

Microinsurance: the Next Generation of Impact Investments

For investors looking to have an impact in emerging markets by building sustainable businesses, microinsurance is a growing niche.

Is Tanzania Ready for Interoperability in Mobile Money?

Even though interoperability could potentially benefit the mobile financial services market, thus far there have been few attempts to get mobile money systems to work together. It may be too early for interoperability in some areas, Tanzania seems ready.

Is Kenya Ready for an MVNO?

Kenya recently granted MVNO licenses to several new companies, allowing them to provide mobile money services without building new cellular infrastructure. This could shake up the mobile money market in Kenya, which has been dominated by Safaricom.

New Data Shows Only 6% of India is Aware of Mobile Money

Financial inclusion in India has the mandate at the highest level of policy making, but the market has yet to respond positively to regulations that allow both public and private actors to pursue digitized payment services. Understanding demand for financial services is key to design services that reach scale.

Enabling Data-Driven Financing for Smallholder Farmers

Mobilizing technology, such as smartphones, tablets, and the Internet, holds a tremendous opportunity to provide financial services for smallholders and to empower them to use data that is critical to their businesses in better ways.

Can Mobile Money Extend Financial Services To Smallholder Farmers

On paper, digital financial services can sound like a silver bullet to reach millions of rural, underserved smallholder farmers. In reality, the challenges can be greater than the deployment of a low-tech solution.

Bringing Mobile Wallets to Nigerian Farmers

Cellulant developed a mobile wallet network in Nigeria that extends to some eight million farmers. With more than 40 million transactions in just two years, smallholder farmers in Nigeria are poised to adopt digital financial services more broadly.

Smallholder Finance: Digital Solutions to Traditional Challenges?

A new CGAP focus note takes a look at the ways digital financial services can help overcome the traditional "pain points" - including higher cost and risk - of serving smallholder farmers with formal financial services.

Why Equity Bank Felt It Had to Become a Telco – Reluctantly

Ignacio Mas and John Staley explain Equity Bank's decision to become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator in Kenya.

Three Lessons from Mobile Microinsurance in Bangladesh

Bima recently commissioned a survey of active Bima Life Insurance customers in order to better understand the profile and behavioral patterns of mobile microinsurance customers in Bangladesh. This blog gives an overview of the findings.

Can a Digitized Post Realize India’s Financial Inclusion Dreams?

With a giant effort currently underway to digitize India’s Post, this blog analyzes the prospects of India’s postal network to address the country’s financial inclusion challenges.

Payment Innovations Improve Access to Solar Energy, Clean Water

A number of business model innovations that link poor households to better basic services are becoming economically viable through advances in digital payments infrastructure. This blog discusses three lessons on how to advance the nascent field of "Digital Finance Plus".

Don’t Forget the Value Proposition for G2P E-Payment Recipients

Theory indicates that G2P payments can be a gateway to financial inclusion, but behavior on the ground suggests that receiving social cash transfers electronically has not influenced recipients to become e-payment users in general.

Infrastructure, Consistency are the Backbone of G2P E-Payments

A new Focus Note examines the opportunities and challenges involved in implementing social cash transfer schemes in Uganda, Haiti, the Philippines, and Kenya

Killer Apps in China: Social Networks and Financial Inclusion

In China, financial services offered through social media have recently begun to take off, with interesting potential to expand financial inclusion.