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> Posted by Anita Gardeva
To solve financial exclusion you have to think big. This is what Mr. Bhagwan Chowdhry, Professor of Finance at UCLA Anderson School, is doing with the Financial Access@ Birth (FAB) initiative. FAB aims to convince governments and financial institutions to provide every child born with a savings account. Behind the simplicity of this big idea lays a powerful rationale and a comprehensive strategy.
Chowdhry, along with a team of experts, plans to bring together governments, multilateral development agencies, banks, technology providers, and non-profits to launch this initiative.
The concept of FAB is to link the birth registration process with the opening of a savings account that has an initial deposit of US $100, provided by government of other philanthropic sources. This account would in effect, give every newborn a financial identity. If FAB takes off-successfully, it can generate a wealth of benefits, including:
- Increase access to formal financial services
- Promote national identification by incentivizing official birth registration
- Facilitate assistance payments (such as government benefits, remittances, or international aid transfers)
- Encourage savings from an early age
The FAB team estimates that it will cost around US $10 billion a year to fund the accounts. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Emily Leeding
Congratulations to Center for Financial Inclusion Faculty Council Members Bhagwan Chowdhry and Paul Hudnut on the Financial Access@Birth (FAB) Campaign. The Campaign is aimed at giving every newborn worldwide a bank account- another innovative way of promoting financial inclusion.
Read all about it in this week’s issue of The Economist: “A FAB idea: Should every child receive a bank account at birth?”
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