Blog

Building India’s Model of Agent Banking

CGAP, in collaboration with the College of Agricultural Banking, just completed a national survey, which captured the big picture on agents across the country. In India, the term customer service point (CSP) is used to refer to individuals who act as agents on behalf of banks.

Exclusion Costs: Financial Inclusion in the Arab World

Arab policymakers, who long regarded microfinance as charity for the poor, are realizing that a financial system that serves only 20 percent of the population is a key ingredient in the recipe for political instability.

Small-balance Savings Accounts: Be Careful What We Wish For?

There is an underappreciated issue in the admirable push to help expand outreach and access to savings accounts amongst the poor: the potential that a savings account, if not suited to an individual’s financial profile, can actually wipe out much of a poor person’s financial assets in a year, or even a few months.

Practitioners and the Global Findex Data

With the release by Gallup and the World Bank of the Global Findex (Financial Inclusion Index), the path to financial inclusion has just been made a little easier to travel.

Microfinance for Water: An Example of Client-Focused Innovation

As Michael Porter and other insightful business thinkers have emphasized, excessive focus on short-term financial performance while ignoring customer and community well-being distorts decision making, inhibits innovation and ultimately limits financial success.

Diversity Is In

Moving clients to the center of the microfinance discourse is producing new data on who they are and how they use (or could use) financial services.

Understanding the Financial Needs of Poor Mexicans

In a perfect market for micro-financial intermediation, product offerings would reflect the distinct needs of a diverse clientele.

Brazil Launches Action Plan for Financial Inclusion Initiative

Princess Máxima highlighted the success of the Business Correspondent (BC) model in the country and its notable results in expanding access to financial services to all municipalities.

The Role of Markets in Rural and Agricultural Finance

With more than 50% of the developing world’s population living in rural areas and global commodity prices on the rise again, there is growing awareness of the need for the development community to work in tandem with the private sector.

Interest Rates: What Are the Lessons from Russia on "How Much Is Too Much?"

The situation in Russia and other countries is now leading us to want to revisit each of these factors, “deconstructing” the concept of “sustainable” interest rates and review factors, to see if this process sheds some light on whether any given interest rate can be considered responsible.

Mobile Banking Ekosystem in India

Mobile banking is just one of the reasons India is a place to watch for innovations in financial inclusion. This short film profiles one such innovation, Eko, to see how businesses chasing the fortune at the base of the pyramid are serving the needs of poor customers in India.

More than Semantics: From “Microcredit” to “Financial Inclusion

Over the past 15 years, the field that CGAP aspires to advance has broadened from the initial focus on microcredit to microfinance, to access-to-finance, and most recently financial inclusion.

Unlocking the Potential of Mobile Money in New Guinea

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a country so complex it defies easy description. A place of such diversity it hosts 850 distinct languages for a population of about 7 million. The population figure, mind you, is only a guess as nobody really knows.

Can the Microfinance Sector Help Deliver Clean Energy?

Offering financial products that enable poor clients to purchase clean, low-carbon alternatives to kerosene, firewood and other conventional fuels is perhaps the most direct way in which microfinance can be mobilized to combat climate change and preserve ecological resources.

Exorbitant Interest Rates:A Response from the Russian Microfinance Industry

The exorbitant interest rates offered by so-called “microlending” companies (who look much more like payday lenders or garden variety loan sharks) to clients of the Russian Post recently gave rise to a wave of indignation on the part of the public, government, mass media and the responsible microfinance industry.

The Global Findex: Filling A Major Gap in the Data Landscape

We believe both policy making and private sector decision making is much improved when it is rooted in rigorous research and analysis. Better evidence can improve outcomes in a number of ways:

What is the Telecom Regulator’s Role in Fostering Mobile Money?

Mobile money feels right for mobile network operators (MNOs): it is an extension of the basic prepaid platform and distribution networks they already operate. Mobile money does require greater surveillance against fraud and money laundering measures, but it’s all fundamentally about secure messaging.

India’s Microfinance Industry: An Anatomy of Risk for April 2012

With around 20 million borrower accounts estimated for March 2012, India still has one of the largest microfinance industries in the world. However, in March 2012 it also had the dubious distinction of having perhaps the worst portfolio quality in the world (at the national level).

Interest Rates on Microloans in Russia: How Much Is Too Much?

Just as the dust settled after a controversial entrance of new players in the Russian microfinance sector about a year ago – those claiming themselves to be ”microfinance organizations” and yet charging 730% interest per annum, another “innovative microfinance” product has totally shocked visitors of the Russian Post, as reflected in a multitude of blogs and in numerous media articles published in recent weeks.

Can MTOs Accelerate the Adoption of Mobile Remittances?

As our understanding of the factors that lead to customer adoption of branchless banking expands, there is a growing consensus that for international remittances services to reach a significant level of scale, they will require an existing mobile money ecosystem that allows for downstream transactions which give users access to a wider array of cost-effective services and products such as payments and access to savings.