Blog

Which Way? Mobile Money and Branchless Banking in 2011

There was much movement in 2010 at the intersect of technology and access to finance for the poor. CGAP’s new 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. The focus is on mobile phones, but we quickly add that some of the most interesting work is still being done with debit cards and even simpler technologies, such as bar codes.

Measuring Cross-indebtedness in Latin America

While over-indebtedness can be difficult to observe in practice, we can use simple surveys to estimate one proxy for over-indebtedness: cross-indebtedness, or the number of institutions from which the typical borrower has a loan.

Headlines for March 2011

Retail banking is not a high margin business. It is one where you have to earn a little from lots of customers, know them well and serve them well – not easy when you have many millions spread over a large area who may not be worth much individually even if they are better off than they have ever been before.

Mobile Money in mHealth

While most mHealth opportunities in developed countries tend to focus on reducing costs, mHealth in poor countries is often tackling the much more basic question of access.

Over-Indebtedness: Roles and Responsibilities of All Actors

Still one of the keys to addressing over-indebtedness is analyzing the ability of the borrower to repay.

Constructing an Early Warning Index

Over-indebtedness has a detrimental effect on all players involved: first and foremost for the borrower.

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?

Two Cautionary Tales from Bangladesh

For leaders who devised Bangladeshi’s microfinance miracle in the first place, adjusting staff instructions and realigning incentives to remove these foolish practices should be a piece of cake.

Can Branchless Banking Be Profitable?

The Agent Network Management toolkit comes with a financial model to help providers project the revenues generated in a branchless banking implementation for each member of the supply chain.

Over-indebtedness: Striking the Right Balance

Over-indebtedness is as old as lending itself. A growing credit market will always bring about cases of client over-indebtedness. To put consumer protection measures in place is an essential part of good practice.

Taking Islamic Microfinance to Scale

Today, microfinance and Islamic finance are professionalized industries with diverse products, growing client bases, and widening geographical coverage. Both have developed innovative solutions to cater to populations that are outside the fold of conventional financial access.

Over-indebtedness: A Practitioner’s Perspective

The large MFIs seem to be revising down their growth targets, there are ongoing experiments with new products and there is some hope that a microcredit bureau, at least on a limited scale, will see the light of day within a year or so.

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 Do Migrant Workers Move Money in India?

To better understand just how costly making remote payments can be for poor households, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned the Centre for Micro Finance at the Institute for Financial and Management Research (IFMR) and the Reserve Bank of India’s College for Agricultural Banking to survey 274 domestic Indian migrants and their families living at opposite ends of four domestic remittance corridors.

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.

A Way Out of High Growth and Multiple Lending Indebtedness Trap

The global debate on over-indebtedness tends to focus on the role of high rates of growth as its cause. The argument is that growth is sustained by the less responsible MFIs who target easy to reach clients – the low hanging fruit – encouraging them to borrow and inadvertently getting them into trouble as a result.

Microcredit Yatra: A Very Indian Journey

Vijay Mahajan, oft described in the Indian media as the “high priest of microfinance,” has set off on a spiritual and literal journey across India to explore the reality of what microcredit has done for poor people.

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.

Debt Stress – A Harmless Cold or a Deadly Virus?

High debt stress holds serious risk for both consumers and for the lending industry.

Over-Indebtedness and Market Forces

The issue of individual over-indebtedness has been around for a long time in microfinance, but the depth and extent of over-indebtedness that has recently emerged in Andhra Pradesh is quite unprecedented.