Blog

Sound Corporate Governance Is Key to Achieving Social Goals

Corporate governance is becoming a topic of high interest among microfinance professionals. Many consider the lack of good corporate governance as one of the main challenges facing the sector in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Can Digital Footprints Lead to Greater Financial Access?

Cell phone use generates data – from basic call data records, to mobile money transactional data, to data from social media usage and so on -- that leaves what can be called a ‘digital footprint.’ The existence of this data is quite extraordinary for those of us interested in developing services for the poor and people with little or no formal financial access. In other words, it is available in a way that can be analyzed.

Behavioral Economics for Market Regulation & Financial Education

Fostering trust and confidence in the soundness of financial markets and its players is crucial towards ensuring smooth and effective financial intermediation.

Why Don’t Low-Income Mexicans Use Formal Savings Products?

To understand why this is the case and to determine if there are ways in which low income Mexicans can be attracted to formal savings and other financial products, CGAP partnered with design firm IDEO.org and one of the largest banks in Mexico Bancomer over the last three months. The purpose was to incubate possible financial products that are financially sustainable for Bancomer but could reach scale and attract the low income Mexican market.

How Do We Improve Microfinance Governance? Start By Measuring It

Unless an MFI aligns its systems to its mission and its products and services to its strategic goals, it will not adequately meet client needs.

Can Myanmar Leapfrog Towards Financial Inclusion?

After years of isolation, the country is finally opening itself up as can be seen by the number of international investors stepping at the door.

The Promises of Evidence-based Consumer Protection Polices

The expansion in credit and other financial products worldwide holds great promise to allow families to invest durable goods or human capital, or simply smooth consumption over time.

Savers, Planners, and Entrepreneurs

Mexico has 27 million households. Twenty-two million of them are middle and low income. Even though banks reach them physically, almost none of these people choose to use bank accounts to manage their money. Watch this eight-minute video in which Xavier faz talks with five low income Mexicans about their day-to-day money management strategies.

Good Governance Is a Prerequisite for Good Business

The concept of granting loans to low-income people based on no more than a solidarity guarantee has evolved into a multibillion dollar industry.

A Trip Around the Corner: Financial Inclusion in the U.S.

Here at CGAP we love to draw global lessons about financial inclusion from our interaction with stakeholders in various countries. But we often neglect learning from the latest innovations in the developed world since we assume that the differences between these countries and the ones we are most interested in are too great. Last year, a few of us attended the annual Underbanked Financial Services Forum organized by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and returned again this year to learn about the latest innovations in the U.S. market.

Using Data to Better Understand Savings Needs of Customers

The use of data to drive management decisions and product design is well known in the financial sector. Today, most commercial banks utilize data analysis to support their decision-making.

How to Save Lives and Lower Fuel Consumption: Clean Cookstoves

Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires – the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly 3 billion people in the developing world – causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and children the most affected.

Are Retailers Better Positioned to Offer Financial Services?

In our first post in this series on the role of consumer goods retailers in financial inclusion, we discussed how retailers are similar to MNOs in their ability to reach unbanked customers. However, the opportunity for financial inclusion via organized retail, while significant, is not present in every country and not necessarily for every type of retailer.

Who Is in Charge of MFIs?

Efforts to improve MFI governance are central to making our industry’s responsible finance movement robust in its practices – not just high-minded principles — and ensuring that it offers meaningful benefits to clients.

From Protection to Inclusion: Shifting to Cashless Payments

All around the world, social protection is evolving into much more than a safety net for the poor. It is becoming a tool for financial inclusion and economic opportunity. Interestingly, stories like these, and the trends behind them, were barely on the radar of the global financial inclusion field three years ago when CGAP published the first official estimate of financially-inclusive G2P payments. Since then, government, donor and NGO efforts to link financial access to government payments has become a swiftly growing movement.

Getting Providers to Think about Client Protection

Important reforms are taking place today aiming to strengthen confidence and responsible practices in (micro) finance. However, financial authorities are not the only ones making efforts to build effective and complete frameworks to ensure responsible finance.

Is Behavioral Finance Relevant to Policymaking?

There is growing interest in—and evidence of—the role that behavioral economics can play in improving consumer financial protection policies.

The Role of Organized Retailers in Financial Inclusion

We have previously discussed on this blog how consumer goods retailers can be part of the financial inclusion landscape. Today, we start to expand on that theme, explaining briefly why retailers are an exciting opportunity for financial inclusion but how that opportunity is not present in every market and, where it is present, how certain types of retailers could place themselves better to serve low-income consumers.

Over-Indebtedness in Microfinance – Who Should Bear the Risk?

While microfinance products and lending methodologies vary significantly on the ground, two main features of microfinance have made this enormous expansion of access to finance possible: microlending has become scalable due to cost efficient operating models and due to risk management methodologies that ensured high repayment rates.

Moving Towards A Robust Global Financial Data Architecture

We should not miss the opportunity for continued investment in data infrastructure. The capability to analyze and interpret data will also be key to advance financial inclusion.