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Which Way? Mobile Money and Branchless Banking in 2011

There was much movement in 2010 at the intersect of technology and access to finance for the poor. CGAP’s new Branchless Banking Database synthesizes a mass of data into a short 12-image “story” about what branchless banking is and the key hurdles we face in 2011. The focus is on mobile phones, but we quickly add that some of the most interesting work is still being done with debit cards and even simpler technologies, such as bar codes.

Why Has Islamic Microfinance Not Reached Scale Yet?

How come in a country like Bangladesh, the largest MFI or bank providing products complying with Sharia reach only 100,000 active borrowers compared to the 22 million active borrowers reached by Grameen Bank, BRAC, and ASA, all of which are providing conventional products?

Headlines for March 2011

Retail banking is not a high margin business. It is one where you have to earn a little from lots of customers, know them well and serve them well – not easy when you have many millions spread over a large area who may not be worth much individually even if they are better off than they have ever been before.

Mobile Money in mHealth

While most mHealth opportunities in developed countries tend to focus on reducing costs, mHealth in poor countries is often tackling the much more basic question of access.

Searching for Success Stories in Banking Beyond Branches

Who would have expected only three years ago that banking beyond branches would be receiving so much attention across the financial services and development industries?

Constructing an Early Warning Index

Over-indebtedness has a detrimental effect on all players involved: first and foremost for the borrower.

Two Cautionary Tales from Bangladesh

For leaders who devised Bangladeshi’s microfinance miracle in the first place, adjusting staff instructions and realigning incentives to remove these foolish practices should be a piece of cake.

Can Branchless Banking Be Profitable?

The Agent Network Management toolkit comes with a financial model to help providers project the revenues generated in a branchless banking implementation for each member of the supply chain.

Taking Islamic Microfinance to Scale

Today, microfinance and Islamic finance are professionalized industries with diverse products, growing client bases, and widening geographical coverage. Both have developed innovative solutions to cater to populations that are outside the fold of conventional financial access.

No Single Recipe When Structuring Agent Networks

When providers are planning the launch of a branchless banking service, one of the critical decisions facing them is how to structure the agent network.

How Do Migrant Workers Move Money in India?

To better understand just how costly making remote payments can be for poor households, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned the Centre for Micro Finance at the Institute for Financial and Management Research (IFMR) and the Reserve Bank of India’s College for Agricultural Banking to survey 274 domestic Indian migrants and their families living at opposite ends of four domestic remittance corridors.

How Agent Network Managers Have Fueled M-PESA’s Success

As CGAP’s new Agent Management Toolkit emphasizes, managing an agent network is complicated. There are a lot of different pieces of the puzzle to get right.

Boosting the Business Case for Agents

FINO was founded on 13th July, 2006 with the single objective of building technologies to enable financial institutions (FIs) to serve the under-served and the unbanked sector and also to service the technology requirements of entities engaged in servicing the bottom of the pyramid customers.

CGAP Releases Agent Management Toolkit

CGAP’s Agent Management Toolkit aims to demystify the process of building a viable agent network. The toolkit is based on more than a year of research that yielded data on more than 16,000 agents with institutions in Brazil (Banco do Brasil and Banco Postal), India (EKO and FINO), and Kenya (M-PESA).

Haiti: Strategies for a Multi-Competitor, Multi-Industry Market

Last year, three partnerships involving all of Haiti’s mobile phone operators and some of the country’s biggest banks announced their intention to launch mobile money services.

Highlights and Headlines for January 2011

The news wires have been busy with the recent announcement of partnerships and joint ventures in the Indian branchless banking market. India’s largest public sector bank, the State Bank of India, announced a joint venture with the mobile operator Bharti Airtel to offer mobile banking. Meanwhile, India’s largest private sector bank, ICICI Bank Ltd, announced its tie-up with Vodafone Essar to bank the unbanked via the mobile phone.

The Lurking Challenge of Activating the Inactive Customer

In the past year, several high-profile branchless banking deployments have publicized the fact that they’ve reached more than one million users. Yet what is never publicized in press releases or speeches is the very low number of active users in most deployments. In a recent CGAP survey, 64% of mobile money managers indicated that less than 30% of their registered users are active, and active rates of less than 10% are not uncommon.

Legally, How Young Is Too Young to Open a Savings Account?

In most countries, youth under the age of 18 are typically prevented from independently opening a savings account because few banks are willing to offer any financial services without requiring a signed contract.

The Alternatives to Mobile Money

Mobile money often begins with a customer withdrawing cash in a store in his or her community, or sending money directly from their mobile money account to a relative living far away.

Broadening the Financial Inclusion Cast of Characters

New technology-enabled models for financial inclusion seek to take transactions outside of bank branches and into retail shops that exist in every community where poor people live and work.