Searching: Research & Analysis

Designing Disclosure Regimes for Responsible Financial Inclusion

This Focus Note offers practical guidance to policy makers who are developing disclosure regimes in low-access environments.

Financially Inclusive Ecosystems: The Roles of Government Today

This Focus Note first describes the challenges of the broader financial inclusion landscape and then explores three promising roles government can play in developing more financially inclusive ecosystems.

Bank Agents: Risk Management, Mitigation, and Supervision

This Focus Note discusses the activities (and related risks) in which bank agents may engage, management and mitigation of agent-related risks, approaches to licensing and supervision of bank agent businesses, and possible corrective measures supervisors may take.

Incorporating Consumer Research into Consumer Protection Policy Making

This Focus Note describes CGAP's experience to date gathering qualitative and quantitative information directly from low-income consumers to inform financial consumer protection policy.

Global Standard-Setting Bodies and Financial Inclusion for the Poor

This white paper aims to raise awareness and frame issues to inform ongoing work by the five standard setting bodies to integrate financial inclusion into standards and guidance that can be effectively applied at the country level.

Responsible Finance: Putting Principles to Work

This paper defines what we mean by responsible finance, both as an end-state vision and in terms of a pragmatic focus on client protection and social performance management.

Too Much Microcredit? A Survey of the Evidence on Over-Indebtedness

This paper is written primarily for microlenders and the institutions that fund them. We examine conceptual issues and the limited empirical evidence about over-indebtedness in microcredit markets.

Regulating Banking Agents

This Focus Note reviews global regulation of the use of agents by banks (and where noted, nonbank service providers) and focuses on four questions related to the safe and scalable use of agents.

Microfinance Banana Skins 2011

Now in its third year, the report reflects changing perceptions of risk in a dynamic and fast-moving industry. Microfinance has come of age, and with that, new issues have arisen.

Consumer Protection Laws and Regulations in Deposit and Loan Services

This paper presents the results of a survey on consumer protection regulations in 142 countries. It also compiles comprehensive information on laws and regulations relevant for consumer protection and discusses a number of challenges related to empirical analyses of financial consumer protection to enable crosscountry comparison.