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> Posted by Center Staff
Last week the Kenyan government officially kicked-off Huduma cards, a fintech initiative aimed at bolstering government services in the country and digital financial inclusion. The program leverages partnerships with Mastercard and a handful of prominent banks. If successful, the new cards will simultaneously improve the government’s functioning, enroll more citizens in key government services like health insurance and social security, and provide digital financial services to many unbanked Kenyans.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Specialist, CFI
If you had to embark on a journey similar to that of the 65 million people who are currently forcibly displaced, what would you bring? Most likely among your provisions would be a smartphone. Phones are the contemporary map and compass, a gateway to critical information, a means for keeping in touch with loved ones, and a financial toolkit. More and more, aid workers are witnessing refugees arriving at camps with smartphones. For both the refugee journey and the post-journey settlement process, a phone can be vital. With this in mind, you might not be surprised to learn that mobile money usage among refugees, including for cash transfers from governments and NGOs, is on the rise.
> Posted by Carmen Paraison, Project Associate, the Smart Campaign
On January 18th, 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) filed suit against Navient, the largest federal and private student loans servicer in the U.S., for “systemically and illegally failing borrowers at every stage of repayment.” Allegations include:
- Misallocating student loan payments by failing to follow instructions from borrowers about how to apply their payments across their multiple loans.
- Steering struggling borrowers toward multiple forbearances instead of lower payments via income-driven repayment plans. (Forbearance is an option that lets borrowers take a short break from making payments, but that still accrues interest.)
- Providing unclear information about how to re-enroll in income-driven repayment plans.
- Deceiving private student loan borrowers about requirements to release their co-signer (e.g. a parent or grandparent) from their loans, which can be advantageous given some lenders’ practices surrounding the death of a co-signer.
- And failing to act when borrowers complained.
Navient currently services more than $300 billion in loans for more than 12 million borrowers.
> Posted by Center Staff
The following post is part of a two-part series on Modelo Perú.
Today, we are excited to share an issue brief on Modelo Perú, a first-of-its kind payments initiative in Peru. The brief, produced in partnership with The Institute of International Finance, explores the successes and challenges that the initiative has seen since its launch in February 2016.
Spearheaded initially by the Bankers’ Association of Peru (ASBANC), Modelo Perú is an effort to establish an interoperable nationwide payments platform. The platform, Bim (Billetera Móvil), brings together financial institutions, government, telecommunications companies, and large payers and payees into a shared payments infrastructure. It intends to expand banking access to the 71 percent of Peruvians who currently lack a bank account, and aims to reduce the transactions costs associated with cash for both financial service providers and other businesses. Modelo Perú has been lauded as an example of interoperability – with many different players coming together to create one seamless payments ecosystem. About one year after its launch, we wanted to explore how ‘seamless’ it has been.
> Posted by Center Staff
A schoolboy looks at an electric light bulb powered by M-KOPA solar technology, as it illuminates his home in Ndela village, Machakos, Kenya.
2016 was the hottest year on Earth since records began in 1880. For those of us who work in financial inclusion but are fearful about our lack of progress in combating climate change, the following is a spot of good news: at the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Ant Financial and the United Nations Environment Program launched the Green Digital Finance Alliance.
> Posted by James Militzer, Editor, NextBillion Financial Innovation
The following post, which was originally published on NextBillion, shares a conversation between Anna Kanze, COO of Grassroots Capital Management, and Daniel Rozas, Independent Consultant, on initial public offerings (IPOs) in microfinance. Both Anna and Daniel have contributed to a number of Financial Inclusion Equity Council (FIEC) publications. Anna was the principal author of the recent FIEC report, “How to IPO Successfully and Responsibly: Lessons From Indian Financial Inclusion Institutions”. The podcast draws from the report’s findings and focuses on the effects of IPOs on Equitas Holdings, Ujjivan Financial Services, SKS Microfinance, and Compartamos.
Initial public offerings have long been a controversial topic in microfinance, and rightly so. The IPOs of Compartamos in Mexico and SKS Microfinance in India, in 2007 and 2010 respectively, made a lot of money for investors and turbocharged the sector’s growth. But they also sparked hyper commercialization and debt crises that rocked the industry, gravely harming its clients and tarnishing its public image.
> Posted by Vinita Godinho, General Manager – Advisory, Good Shepherd Microfinance
You might not know it, but one in every five Australian adults (3.3 million people) is financially excluded, unable to access safe, affordable, and appropriate financial products and services when they need them. This increases their likelihood of experiencing financial hardship and poverty. Two million people in the country also experience high to severe financial stress, reducing their resilience or ability to recover from financial shocks. Those impacted, particularly women, also experience poorer socioeconomic and health outcomes, especially lower education, employment, and income status. Whose problem is this to solve?
Against the backdrop of ongoing global financial and political uncertainty, financial inclusion challenges exacerbate the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. In Australia for example, those holding the top 20 percent of wealth have around 70 times more than those in the bottom 20 percent. The country’s growing income inequality does not reflect changes in household characteristics, rather changes in the size of persistent and transitory income shocks. Lack of inclusion and resilience via insurance, savings, credit, and payments therefore compound the impacts of growing inequalities of opportunity, stifling upward mobility between generations, increasing social tensions, and reducing economic growth.
So who’s best placed to respond to this growing problem – the government with its policy vision for financial well-being and capability; business which designs product offerings and offers employment; researchers who study inequality, gather evidence and create theories; or the community sector, which is usually the first line of defense for excluded and vulnerable Australians?
> Posted by Greta Bull, CEO, CGAP
The following post was originally published on the CGAP blog.
Returning from the holidays, we at CGAP are turning our attention to the future. I used the down time over the break to reflect on the topics I believe are likely to shape the future of financial services for the poor. Building efficient, large-scale digital ecosystems that dramatically reduce the cost of delivering financial and other services has been an important focus of CGAP’s for many years. But what do we think will enable the emergence of such large ecosystems and ensure their broad accessibility?
I would posit that four factors are changing the landscape for financial inclusion before our eyes:
Technology and distribution
Technology is a clear enabler. None of what we have seen emerge in the last 10 years would have been possible without technology. But technology on its own is not the answer: distribution is the other side of the equation, and its importance is often overlooked in the excitement over new technologies. To access digital financial services, access to a mobile connection is important, but it is equally important to be able to convert cash to digital money and, at least for now, back into cash again. So mobile phones have been important in places like Kenya, but the real game changer has been the emergence of large and well-functioning agent networks. Until accounts are more widely available or people are willing to accept the leap into purely digital money, agents will remain a fact of life.
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