Recent Blogs
Blog
Formality and Informality: Lessons from the New Findex Survey
The Findex project helps to correct a long-standing imbalance in evidence on global finance: an abundance of data on the supply of financial services but curiously little that’s systematic and comparative about global demand.Blog
ARPU Going Low: The Role of Financial Services in Latin America
The model for obtaining significant revenues must be one in which the carriers are efficient players of the ecosystem, beyond the mere provision of connectivity to mobile phones.Blog
Can We Sustainably Reach the Poorest?
Recent reports reveal that we’re making some progress in the fight against poverty, but there’s been little effect on the most challenging to reach—the ultra-poor.Blog
Two Persistent Divides in Financial Inclusion: Gender and Rural
For the first time, we have hard data to evaluate how women and rural residents around the world save, borrow, make payments and manage risk both inside and outside the formal financial sector.Blog
Measuring Financial Exclusion: How Many People Are Unbanked?
Thanks to the launch of the Global Findex data set, based on nationally representative surveys of more than 150,000 adults in 148 economies, we know that approximately 2.5 billion adults lack a formal bank account and most of these people are concentrated in developing economies.Blog
How Perception and Trust Shape Adoption
How does a company, or in this case – a new player in the financial services market – change the way it is perceived among a new customer segment it is trying to reach with new products and services?Blog
Meanwhile in Brazil...Are We There Yet?
The job of financial inclusion in Brazil is arguably done. Brazil’s banks have made it a global leader in branchless banking. The underlying retail payment infrastructure is in place. There are agent locations in almost every municipality. New agent management companies from around the world regularly visit more than 30 of their counterparts in Brazil to understand how the business works. And Brazil’s Bolsa Familia program, already successful in moving beyond G2P payments to credit and savings, is considered a global flagship. We start here by presenting our learnings from Brazil and share our summary note on the industry.Blog
Better Data Can Mean Better Decisions For Financial Inclusion
Better financial inclusion data is critical to inform financial inclusion policy making and advance financial inclusion, globally and nationally.Blog
How Does Mobile Money in Kenya Affect Financial Inclusion?
The rapid uptake of mobile money transfer in Kenya has ignited enthusiasm globally over the potential to bank poor people via the platform of mobile phone technology. On the basis of research undertaken for Financial Sector Deepening Kenya, I argue that the evidence suggests an alternative explanation which means that formal service provision for poor people needs to be thought through in a very different way. It means going beyond the expectation that mobile technology can adequately lower transactions costs to produce a revolution in inclusion, to recognising that managing financial resources has important social dimensions.Blog
Making Clean Technology A Viable Business for Women in Africa
Energy poverty, climate change, financial inclusion and women empowerment are all closely related. Of the 1.6 billion people globally without access to electricity, 70% are women and girls.Blog
Jipange Kusave: A Mobile-only Attack on the Kenyan Mattress
When we launched Jipange KuSave – a mobile-only savings product – in Kenya in early 2010, our goal was to out-compete the mattress. Back then, Safaricom’s M-PESA service was in hyper-growth phase and ramping up to become the de facto national retail payment system. But even more exciting was M-PESA’s potential as a pervasive and low-cost delivery channel for a wider set of financial services.Blog
Scaling Climate Smart Agriculture by Financing Small and Growing Businesses
Excluded from formal markets and unable to access agricultural inputs, market information and credit, many rural poor adopt survival techniques such as illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture that degrade the environment and contribute to global warming.Blog
Branchless Banking Country Notes
Over the past several months, we have taken a close look at the branchless banking industry in our focus countries.Blog
Evolving Microfinance–Why We Might Appear to Talk Past Each Other
Now, over time the field realized that this story, while true at its narrow core, is too simplistic and other factors are important to achieve sustained, large-scale poverty reduction and growth of local economy.Blog
Can Third-Party Providers Lead to New Business Models?
Until recently, Zoona, formerly known as Mobile Transactions could have been considered the best kept secret in Africa. Operating in Zambia on a shoe-string budget, they have been developing their own unique business model for electronic financial services slowly and with little media attention. Now, as of February 2012, this small company has secured investments from three big investors, Omidyar Network, ACCION Frontier Investments, and Sarona Asset Management. All three are banking on the fact that Zoona’s experience and innovative approach to serving a range of consumers situates them to fill crucial gaps in the mobile money transactions and payments market in Africa.Blog
Latest Impact Research: Inching Towards Generalization
It has become possible to generalize more responsibly about the impacts of microfinance.Blog
Powering Remittances Flows between Russia and Tajikistan
It can be concluded the Russia-Tajikistan corridor offers some interesting insights on how one might link financial products to remittance flows, but it also provides insights on the basic challenges accounting for why no significant scale has yet been reached.Blog
Making Disclosure Work for Low-Income Financial Consumers
Consumer research supported by CGAP and others around the world is painting a similar picture – customers face many challenges in understanding the prices, terms and conditions of the financial services they use, and this lack of understanding carries very real economic consequences.Blog
From Banker to Service Designer
We believe that the key barrier to financial inclusion for the poor is one of design—of how financial products are created and positioned in the market, which consumers are targeted and how delivery channels are utilized.Blog