Searching: Research & Analysis

Financial Services for Gig Workers: Lessons on Getting Design and Delivery Right

This brief highlights four examples of successful design and delivery methods employed by industry leaders in providing financial services to gig workers.

Bolstering Women’s Climate Resilience and Adaptation through Financial Services

Financial services help people to reduce the impact of and to adapt to climate-related risks. Yet women have less access to such tools. This working paper illustrates how women are differently impacted by climate change and how financial services can play a better role in strengthening their autonomous adaptive capacities to climate change.

Instant Payments and Merchants — Pricing Policy Considerations

This technical note helps explain why changes in instant payment pricing are occurring, assesses their impact on market development, and offers suggestions for the path forward.

Starting the Transaction: Payment Initiation and Customer Experience

This technical note is framed to help policymakers and payment system operators understand recent trends in payment initiation and customer experience in making interoperable payments work better for low-income populations.

Business Intelligence: A Bedrock of Successful Digitization in Microfinance

Microfinance institutions that successfully generate value for their business and customers through digitization anchor these efforts in business intelligence. This Technical Note outlines an approach for improving business intelligence with interventions that require minimum or no investment in technology. CGAP also offers a customer dashboard library with detailed instructions for data teams and a tutorial video.

Emerging Trends in National Financial Inclusion Strategies that Support Women’s Entrepreneurship

Women entrepreneurs continue to face persistent gender-based barriers that impede their success – such as unequal access to financial accounts, constrained credit, and normative roles that keep women in the role of primary caregivers. Improved financial inclusion can help reduce some of these barriers. This WBL-CGAP Brief presents data collected by the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project on how National Financial Inclusion Strategies can spur policy and regulatory reforms in support of women’s entrepreneurship. 

Igniting SDG Progress Through Digital Financial Inclusion (2023 edition)

Building on the success of the first edition in 2018, the 2023 edition of Igniting SDG Progress Through Digital Financial Inclusion looks at evidence-based examples for the 13 global goals relevant to digital financial inclusion. This work is a collaboration between the Office of United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development (UNSGSA Queen Máxima), Better Than Cash Alliance, the United Nations Capital Development Fund, CGAP and the World Bank. 

The Promise of Fintech for Micro and Small Enterprises

Nearly 500 million micro and small enterprises (MSEs) are estimated to be operating around the world. Access to credit and other financial services is critical to the growth and sustainability of these businesses, and consequentially to the low-income and vulnerable populations which rely on MSEs for their livelihoods. Yet despite decades of efforts and some notable successes in expanding MSE finance, the credit gap remains an estimated 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars.

Building Blocks of a Modern G2P Architecture

G2P systems seldom fulfill their potential because they underutilize the capabilities of digital payments systems. As a result, recipients are prevented from exercising choice over the account or withdrawal points that are used. This results in a poor experience for beneficiaries, reduces the financial inclusion potential, and can lead to costly and inefficient systems that are unfit for purpose.

Agent Networks at the Last Mile​: Implications for Financial Regulators

Rural agent networks are critical to “last mile” financial inclusion. This reading deck for regulators does three things: (i) it shows how expanding rural Cash-in/Cash-out (CICO) agent networks is key to ensuring more inclusive digital financial systems; (ii) it illustrates industry innovations that are making rural CICO more viable; and (iii) it presents a set of regulatory considerations that can enable such innovations within a stable financial system.