You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Branchless Banking’ category.
> Posted by Center Staff
Globally, the cost of fraud in the telecoms industry amounts to about 2 percent of total revenues, roughly US $46 billion. In the mobile money segment, it’s estimated that about 2 to 3 percent of revenues generated from phone-based banking are lost to fraudulent activity. In India, where the mobile subscriber base is over 980 million individuals, covering over 70 percent of the country’s population, mobile money presents a big opportunity for banking the unbanked. And awareness of this is catching on. Just this week Paytm, a mobile wallet service in India backed by Alibaba’s financial arm, announced that they’ve surpassed the 100 million client mark.
As more individuals are brought into the mobile banking fold, including those of lower income levels, it’s increasingly important that fraud risks are thoroughly managed. If they aren’t, clients will suffer, and so will their perceptions of formal banking services. A new report from Deloitte investigates the risks facing India’s mobile money market and how to best manage them.
The report outlines and offers the root causes of seven categories of fraud: phishing fraud; intrusion/ cyber attack; access to wallet through unauthorized SIM swap; fake KYC; commission fraud by agents; and application manipulation by authorized users. (The latter two are frauds carried out by internal stakeholders, like agents, employees, and third-party vendors.) As one example, in the case of phishing (when fraudsters dupe customers through phone calls/SMS/emails to share sensitive information), the root cause is inadequate customer awareness around information sharing and customer data theft.
> Posted by Prateek Shrivastava, Global Director, Channels & Technology, Accion
#464353034 / gettyimages.com
The National Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria passed the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Act in 2007. The Act included provisions for the creation of the CBN to ensure monetary stability, issuing and maintaining legal tender, and promoting the implementation of best practices including the use of electronic payment systems in all banks across Nigeria.
In the same year, the CBN developed the Financial System Strategy 2020 wherein the need for electronic financial services (amongst many other reforms) to make Nigeria a competitive economy was identified. Since 2008, the CBN has been extremely active in developing and implementing guidelines and frameworks to support the digitization of financial services (for example, all banks and microfinance banks need to have core banking systems, and the use of ATMs is governed) including mobile money and agent banking. The Guidelines on Mobile Money Services in Nigeria were approved and published in June 2009. Most recently, the CBN has also released a licensing framework for “super agents” that banks and other regulated financial services providers can use to bring services to the markets and streets in Nigeria.
Nigeria’s mobile money market hosts about two dozen licensed mobile money operators (MMOs) that include banks and others, which, in spite of their array, have proven inadequate in terms of country coverage and active adoption.
In the recent words of Dipo Fatokun, Director of the Banking and Payment System Department of the CBN, “Expectations of mobile money [in Nigeria] have not fully been met.” Annual mobile money transactions in the country in 2014 exceeded N5 billion (US$25 million), while in Kenya and Tanzania total annual transactions in 2013 were US$22 billion and US$18 billion.
A report from EFINA published in 2014, a full five years after the CBN guidelines for mobile money were put in place, shows that only 800,000 Nigerian adults currently use mobile money, representing less than one percent of the adult population. Today, even arguably the most successful entity, Pagatech Nigeria with its innovative use of technology and strong management team, is advertised sporadically on the streets of Lagos and even less further afield. Awareness is low and therefore adoption is low.
In my opinion, this lack of progress can be attributed to two key issues:
Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Center Staff
The latest edition of the Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed, our weekly online magazine sharing the big news in banking the unbanked, is now available. Among the stories in this week’s edition are the release of a New America Foundation report on account dormancy in youth savings, Yemen exploring mobile banking to combat the hardships of war, and Cambodia launching its first agricultural insurance programs. Here are a few more details:
- The New America report considers how to understand the challenge of youth account dormancy in large-scale account-based initiatives and policy efforts, describing the range of issues related to account engagement from the perspectives of financial institutions, policymakers, and account-holders.
- Yemen, following its central bank passing regulation on e-money and mobile money in December, is looking to the development of digital finance to cover critical services during wartime, as 30 to 40 percent of bank branches are closed.
- The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC) has launched the country’s first agricultural insurance programs, in the form of pilots for the next year and a half, protecting rice farmers against loss from drought and floods.
For more information on these and other stories, read the latest issue of the FI2020 News Feed here, and make sure to subscribe to the weekly online magazine by entering your email address in the right-hand menu so you can be notified when the latest issue comes out.
Have you come across a story or initiative you think we should cover? Email your ideas to Eric Zuehlke at .
> Posted by Center Staff
Will microfinance continue to be relevant in 2020 and beyond? Should regulators or the industry lead on client protection? Will data analytics replace traditional credit reporting systems?
A new Financial Inclusion 2020 e-magazine explores these three essential questions debate-style, tapping industry leaders from around the world to weigh in with their perspectives.
Microfinance as a development strategy has in the past few years been eclipsed by the excitement around financial inclusion. This transition reflects the recognition that people need a full range of financial services. What does the future hold for microfinance institutions and other players like traditional banks and new fintech companies? Bindu Ananth, Chair of IFMR Trust and IFMR Holdings, Dean Karlan, President of Innovations for Poverty Action, and Liza Guzman, Vice President of Accion share their views.
The ideal balance in client protection is often conceived as a three-legged stool in which regulators, providers, and consumers work at equal levels of responsibility. Globally, regulators have often taken the lead, but initiatives such as the Smart Campaign prove that there is room for providers to move beyond compliance. Is a balanced three-legged stool realistic? Among the debaters are Alok Prasad, Principal Advisor of RBL Bank, Sanjay Sinha, Managing Director of M-CRIL, and Isabelle Barres, Director of the Smart Campaign.
> Posted by Center Staff
Good morning! Freshly published is the latest edition of the Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed, our weekly online magazine sharing the big news in banking the unbanked. Among the stories in this week’s edition are the World Council receiving a USAID award to catalyze affordable housing in Haiti, a multi-partner initiative to train women across Nigeria to become mobile banking agents, and Tanzania setting a new financial inclusion goal. Here are a few more details:
- The World Council with support from USAID and others will work directly with financial institutions and housing developers to help expand affordable housing financial products and services in Haiti.
- The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women is working with FirstBank to provide technical, business, and financial literacy training to 2,500 women across Nigeria to become agents for FirstBank’s mobile banking platform.
- Last week Tanzania set a new goal of extending financial services access to 75 percent of the population in 2016 – as a follow-up to the goal of 55 percent in 2016, which was surpassed in 2014.
For more information on these and other stories, read the latest issue of the FI2020 News Feed here, and make sure to subscribe to the weekly online magazine by entering your email address in the right-hand menu so you can be notified when the latest issue comes out.
Have you come across a story or initiative you think we should cover? Email your ideas to Eric Zuehlke at .
> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly, Fellow, CFI
Financial Inclusion 2020 (FI2020) is a global multi-stakeholder movement to achieve full financial inclusion, using the year 2020 as a focal point for action. This blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe and share insights from key thought leaders in financial inclusion, with a specific focus on quality beyond access.
Tuesday marked a historic day for Peru: the country launched its National Financial Inclusion Strategy. While Peru has been lauded in the past for its environment for financial inclusion, its public-private sector partnerships, and its leadership in conversations on international banking standards, this national strategy elevates Peru’s commitment to financial inclusion to a new level. In particular, we want to celebrate the strategy’s commitments to consumer protection, financial literacy, and the inclusion of vulnerable people.
Analysis of the World Bank Global Findex this year revealed that countries that have a national strategy (not merely a commitment or stand-alone programs) for financial inclusion saw twice as much bank account access growth in the last three years compared to countries that did not have a national strategy. For Peru, this is great news, as according to the same data source, less than 30 percent of adults in the country had access to an account in 2014.
The path to financial inclusion articulated in the strategy, however, is not focused on access to accounts, making Peru an outlier among its peers that have implemented national strategies. Instead, Peru has oriented its strategy toward improving systems for accessing a range of products and promoting supportive consumer protection, financial education, and attention to the most vulnerable. The national strategy has seven different lines of action: Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Eric Zuehlke, Web and Communications Director, CFI
One theme we come across repeatedly at CFI is the discrepancy between financial services access and usage. A central tenet of our vision of financial inclusion is that access isn’t enough; financial services need to meet client needs and actually be used. One example is mobile banking. As is now well known, millions are now accessing financial services for the first time with mobile payment platforms through telcos. As our By the Numbers report found, however, the proportion of financial services accounts that are mobile is much smaller for the world in general – East Africa is the outlier.
I just returned from an exciting two-week assignment through Accion’s Ambassador program with Akiba Commercial Bank in Tanzania. I met with Akiba staff, visited branch offices, and talked with clients. (You can read about my experiences, including a trip to Zanzibar and terrifying/awesome motorcycle taxi trips on the Ambassador blog.) Since I was in the region with the world’s highest adoption of mobile banking, I wanted to take the opportunity to learn more about how Akiba’s mobile banking experience has worked out, both from staff and client perspectives. Has adoption and usage met expectations? What kind of feedback was Akiba hearing from clients? What challenges was Akiba facing with their mobile platform?
> Posted by Kim Wilson, the Fletcher School, Tufts University
Today, I used my smartphone to pound tiny nails into a wall. The procedure worked well enough to hang a small picture, but it cracked my phone case.
I wasn’t trying to go digital by using a mobile device. I simply could not find the proper tool – a hammer. The episode made me think that going hammer-lite would be silly for a pounding task. I really needed a hammer. If I were trying to tighten a screw, a task I just had to do on a door handle, I suppose I could go screwdriver-lite. I could try to wedge a tag of the broken phone casing into the screw’s octagonal chamber, then give it a twist. It might work. But an Allen wrench might work better.
So, in financial inclusion why are we trying to go “cash-lite?” Cash can be a sturdy pair of pliers that turn income into neat, countable paper stacks – one pushed into the desk drawer for buying groceries and another plopped into a tin for evenings out. Cash can also be a wrench, torqued just so, to help us make sure that we have enough coins to pay the parking attendant or enough paper to pay ourselves when we feel the need to devise a personal austerity plan.
As customers, we really don’t want to go wrench-lite, hammer-lite, or even cash-lite. We just want the best tools possible.
Though the financial inclusion industry trumpets customer-centricity – putting the customer at the center of our decisions about how to best serve them – how it goes about this endeavor is baffling. One might presume that a good method would be to ask the customer what task she wants to perform and then find or make the best tools to help her, as this video suggests. But, for the most part, that’s not our way. We constantly urge – “get an account, go cash-lite” – ignoring a lack in evidence that otherwise might prove: going digital increases income equality, growth, and customer happiness. In fact, the opposite has been documented.
> Posted by Center Staff
Good morning! It’s the start of another week, which means there’s a new issue of the Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed, our weekly online magazine sharing the big news in banking the unbanked. This week’s issue includes stories on the Islamic Development Bank supporting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s research on bitcoin and blockchain technology, and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) creating a new financial inclusion committee. Here are a few more details:
- Last week the Islamic Development Bank’s Chief Economist asserted the importance of Islamic finance in achieving the SDGs and the Bank pledged over $150 billion over the next 15 years towards achieving them.
- An interview with CoinDesk highlights the Gates Foundation’s recent research on how blockchain technology might be helpful as a means of settlement between payment systems and in international remittances.
- The RBI created a committee to devise a five-year measurable action plan for financial inclusion covering areas such as payments, deposits, credit, social security transfers, pensions, insurance, and consumer protection.
For more information on these and other stories, read the sixth issue of the FI2020 News Feed here, and make sure to subscribe to the weekly online magazine by entering your email address in the right-hand menu so you can be notified when the latest issue comes out.
Have you come across a story or initiative you think we should cover? Email your ideas to Eric Zuehlke at .
> Posted by Center Staff
#473882786 / gettyimages.com
In the first quarter (Q1) of 2015, smartphones comprised 47 percent of Africa’s market sales, while the market share of feature phones decreased by about 20 percent. Those are some of the big findings from the International Data Corporation’s “Q1 2015 Mobile Phone Tracker” released earlier this week. Examining both Africa and the Middle East, the report uncovered that between the two regions, compared to last year, smartphone sales increased by 66 percent during the first quarter of this year, totaling 36 million units. Nigeria and South Africa were the biggest smartphone markets on the continent, responsible for roughly 14 and 12 percent of sales respectively. By 2019, it’s projected that feature phone sales will dwindle to only 27 percent of the market in Africa and the Middle East.
The prevalence of inexpensive smartphones, aided in part through partnerships between mobile network operators and handset manufacturers, has helped fuel recent growth. Smartphones are being designed and introduced specifically for the African market. Harnessing supply chain efficiencies and accepting lower profit margins, handset makers are offering units in some cases as inexpensively as for US$30. According to market research firm GfK, globally, compared to the previous quarter, during Q1 of 2015 low-end smartphones saw a market share increase from 52 to 56 percent. Total smartphone sales increased by 8 percent to US$96 billion, while units sold increased by 7 percent to about 310 million. Most of this growth came from Africa, the Middle East, and emerging Asia-Pacific markets. Android is dominating in Africa. Eighty-nine percent of smartphones shipped in Africa during Q1 of 2015 were powered by Android – with about 45 percent of these priced below US$100.
Facebook
Twitter
Recent Comments