Searching: Blogs

Waiting in Line…Where’s My Agent? Headlines and Highlights

I’m blogging from Dakar, Senegal where I had a stark reminder of why innovation in financial services is so necessary.

Will Brazil’s Banks Share Agents?

In a country where agents have existed for close to 10 years nationwide, we would expect that by now banks would have found business reasons to share agents. From a consumer perspective, it is clearly attractive to be able to access banking services for multiple providers at a single agent.

How to Run With Mobile Money and Not Fall

In this post, Dalberg colleague, Matt Shakhovskoy, identifies some internal challenges at MNOs that prevent them from delivering success with mobile money.

Why Distributing Mobile Money Is Harder than Airtime for MNOs

It’s often said mobile network operators (MNOs) have the advantage over banks in creating agent networks from their dense carpet of prepaid airtime sellers. But is this true?

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?

CGAP Releases Agent Management Training Package

In February 2011, CGAP released an Agent Management Toolkit based on 500 interviews with agents, agent network managers and financial institutions in Brazil (Banco do Brasil and Banco Postal), India (EKO and FINO), and Kenya (M-PESA). This post introduces an Agent Management Training Package to enable practitioners to train their service partners about key steps in building a robust agent network.

Delivering Government Payments in the Wilds of Northern Kenya

Social transfer programmes all over the globe are recognizing the value of paying cash grants through some form of financial “account”, accounts increasingly administered by a network of payment agents.

Focus on Product, Pricing and Agents to Drive Adoption

CGAP’s 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. We’ve converted that into a three-part series, which we conclude today.

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?

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 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).

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.

10 Things You Thought You Knew about M-PESA

Few initiatives in microfinance, or for that matter in development, have been as successful as M-PESA: 3 and a half years after launch, over 70% of households in Kenya and more importantly over 50% of the poor, unbanked and rural populations use the service.

Mobile Banking: Agents as Mediators

Following on from last week’s post on the concept of ‘mediated use’ – asking someone to complete all or part of a task that the user is unable, or unwilling to do – how motivated are agents in helping customers complete all or some of the task?

Managed Chaos: Keeping Track of Agents

The key is pattern recognition. That’s where the color coding, scoring and sortability of FINO’s system comes into play.

Can Branchless Banking Be Distributed Like Coca-Cola?

In India, a single distributor for a company like Coca-Cola (or Airtel or Nestle) works with several hundred retailers who sell Coca-Cola’s products. The distributor is responsible for selecting retailers, managing inventory, picking up/delivering cash and managing paperwork (e.g., for SIM registrations). Is it feasible for a distributor to add mobile banking to the other products they sell?

India’s Doorstep Banking: FINO Starts Something New

FINO agents in Karnataka offer no-frill bank accounts from the State Bank of India (SBI). Some agents also sell insurance products.

CGAP Releases New Research on Banking Agents in India

As part of a new series of research on agents and mobile/branchless banking, this month we started a series of blog posts about recent field visits with some of India’s most prominent organizations that make use of agents.