Recent Blogs
Blog
Client Protection: Are We There Yet?
Since its launch, the Smart Campaign has made enormous strides toward ensuring that clients of microfinance would receive transparent, respectful, and prudent treatment.Blog
What Does Research Tell Us about Consumer Protection?
Recent behavioral research on financial decision-making has demonstrated how we often rely on imperfect information and limited options to decide things like which bank has the best terms, whether we should save now and buy later, or maybe turn that extra cash into an investment.Blog
Cash Transfers and Mobile Money: Making it Work
There are many reasons to be excited about mobile phones as a way to distribute cash transfers, such as government payments or NGO cash-for-work programs.Blog
Is Responsible Finance in Your DNA?
Responsible finance is a way of doing business – a never-ending process of adapting your products, processes and policies to keep your clients at the center.Blog
Partnering with Private Sector on Branchless Banking
Working with commercial actors with multi-million dollar balance sheets is incredibly rewarding and can be very different from interactions with traditional MFIs.Blog
Branchless Banking Headlines & Highlights: Updates from Africa and Beyond
Summer is now officially over here in Washington and the busy fall season is off to a quick start. If you are just getting back into high gear, maybe this is a good time for us to recap some of the things we’ve been discussing on the blog over the last couple months, some of the latest news that’s caught our attention, and some things to keep your eye on in the coming weeks.Blog
Microfinance Should Have Started with Savings
Much of the world is in trouble today because of debt, too much borrowing, presumably not enough saving, by individuals, companies, countries and groups of countries.Blog
Public Funders in Branchless Banking
Public funders have been instrumental in promoting and developing the microfinance industry; close to 70% of cross border public funding going into microfinance comes from public sources. Currently, the financial inclusion world is abuzz with excitement about branchless banking and the potential of services like M-PESA in Kenya to dramatically reduce costs and increase access to financial services. Yet branchless banking is a new delivery channel mainly implemented by private stakeholders such as for-profit mobile network operators or commercial banks.Blog
Responsible Finance: The “New Normal”?
We should expect the great majority of microfinance providers, funders and others that are double bottom line institutions to be able to measure the extent to which they’re benefiting their clients and to use this information to improve services.Blog
Why Can’t We Answer the Question: Does Aid Work?
Whether you find it extraordinary or trivial, we still cannot answer the simple question of whether aid works or not.Blog
Innovation in Branchless Banking at the Bangladesh Post Office
On a recent visit to Bangladesh Sarah Rotman and I met with Post Office Director General, Mobasherur Rahman, at his office in the middle of busy downtown Dhaka to hear about his foray into the world of branchless banking.Blog
Why Poor People Don’t Use Savings Accounts
Recently a colleague shared results of the follow-on (forthcoming) study that Dupas and Robinson did on their landmark 2009 RCT study on savings in Western Kenya.Blog
Voices from the Poverty Trap
Qualitative research gives us deep insight into how the participants of the Graduation program experienced change.Blog
The Faces of Graduation
The essence of the qualitative research series are the participants themselves. Get to know the faces of graduation. Read their words, and become acquainted with their stories.Blog
Can SmartAid Improve Accountability within Funders?
Interesting lessons came out of the recent CGAP Aid Effectiveness conference where the SmartAid Index for Microfinance was featured.Blog
Rural Finance: Let’s Crack the Nut!
Rural areas, marked by dispersed populations and limited infrastructure, pose enormous challenges to financial service providers trying to reach different segments of the rural population, and it remains an underserved market.Blog
Mobile Money Moving Rapidly Ahead in Haiti
Despite the difficulties in Haiti during 2010 and into 2011 (earthquake, infrastructure destruction, elections and political unrest, cholera epidemic, tropical storms, floods, and gas shortages), the response to HMMI by the mobile operators, technology providers, financial institutions, institutional users, and Haitians has been very positive, with both Tcho Tcho Mobile and Ti-Cash launched before the end of 2010.Blog
Making Microfinance Prices More Transparent
The problem of keeping your price transparent is obvious — it’s difficult to show a true price that looks higher than the competition when, in fact, it is lower than that charged by others.Blog
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.Blog