Fintechs and Financial Inclusion: Looking Past the Hype and Exploring Their Potential
Webinar
For all the buzz around fintech, there is little evidence about how specific fintech innovations solve pain points in financial inclusion and also reach scale and sustainability. A new CGAP report, “Fintechs and Financial Inclusion: Looking Past the Hype and Exploring Their Potential,” identifies several early-stage fintech innovations that advance financial inclusion, based on two years of pilots with 18 fintechs around the world. The report also tracks the challenges businesses face in developing countries while trying to bring these innovations to the market and attract funding for scale.
In this webinar, speakers highlighted the fintech innovations and key findings emerging from the report. Bernie Akporiaye, founder of digital financial services platform MaTontine, discussed some of the challenges identified for fintechs: perfecting their value proposition for customers, building the right partnerships to get innovations off the ground, and attracting funding to scale. Yaw Mante, investment associate at fintech investment firm Flourish, spoke about the need for funders to broaden their horizons beyond payments and credit innovations, and consider other fintech models that can improve low-income customers’ lives.
Event Resources
Related Publication: Fintechs and Financial Inclusion >>
CGAP's collection of fintech resources >>
Speakers
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Gayatri Murthy | Financial Sector Specialist | CGAP Gayatri leads CGAP’s research on how fintech startups can catalyze financial inclusion. She has over 10 years of experience in building customer-centric financial services for underserved customers. She has led workshops for staff from financial institutions around the world, including at training events organized by the Boulder Institute for Microfinance, the Social Performance Task Force and the Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance. Before joining CGAP, Gayatri worked at Intermedia, where she conducted nationally representative surveys, impact evaluations and qualitative studies on the role of digital technologies in financial inclusion and civil society building. |
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Bernie Akporiaye | Co-Founder and CEO | MaTontine Bernie is co-founder and CEO of MaTontine, a digital financial services platform that digitizes traditional savings circles called tontines to provide access to small loans and a range of financial services to the financially excluded in Francophone Africa. Bernie has a personal mission of helping to reduce poverty in Africa through entrepreneurship and technology. He's has over 20 years' experience internationally and in Africa and is a qualified accountant and financial software expert. |
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Yaw Mante | Investment Associate | Flourish As an investment associate at Flourish, Yaw sources and assesses investments in innovative companies that are advancing financial health in Africa. Prior to Flourish, Yaw was an investment associate for the Financial Inclusion Initiative at Omidyar Network. Before that, he was a valuations manager at Ernst&Young, where he advised financial services firms and central banks on transactions, restructuring and recapitalizations across Europe. Early in his career, Yaw worked with the global mergers and acquisitions execution team responsible for the inorganic growth of Barclays’ global cards business. He also advised the company on the structuring and pricing of joint ventures and commercial partnerships. |