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CFI Fellow Patrick Traynor, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, explains his research on the privacy and security of data in mobile lending applications.
We have all seen privacy policies before: sign up for a credit card and you receive a pamphlet with tiny print detailing your bank’s particular policy. Create an account at an online service and you will get a link to something similar from it, too. These policies are supposed to provide consumers with detailed information about which pieces of their data will be stored, how they might be used, with whom they can be shared, and how they will be protected. Privacy policies are now mandatory for financial institutions in developed nations, and here in the United States we are provided protection by laws such as the “Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act” (also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999).
Unfortunately, the reality of such policies is often not so clear. Many of these policies are written by attorneys with the sole intention of being consumed later on by other attorneys. That means that, in some cases, even highly educated individuals without a degree in law may not be able to fully understand what they are reading. What chance does the common consumer have to understand such policies?
You would think that consumers would be up in arms. But, let’s be honest – most people have never actually read these privacy policies, yet alone tried to understand them. Have you?
So then why is it important to examine the state of privacy policies?
Let me offer first an insight into the role of studies like ours and then some comments on why privacy policies for digital credit matter.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Specialist, CFI
A record number of people, more than ever in our lifetimes, are fleeing their homes due to wars, persecution, and disasters. Nearly 20 people are forcibly displaced every minute, amounting to 28,300 people each day. Roughly 65 million people are currently displaced worldwide, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. This figure is about the size of the population of France or the United Kingdom. About 22 million of the displaced are refugees (displaced across country borders). And more than half of whom are under the age of 18.
Today on World Refugee Day, we call on the international community to provide compassion for the displaced and support and solidarity for those working tirelessly to help them. It’s an opportunity to reflect on what we can do to overcome inaction, indifference, and fear.
Two areas in need of attention, as today’s news has so painfully affirmed, are enhanced water rescue operations and more viable and safer alternatives for those in need of international protection. Today we learned that several ships that disembarked from the coast of Libya over the weekend sank and more than 120 refugees are feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.
> Posted by Ross Tasker, COO, Nobuntu
A worker prunes trees
Imagine an elderly lady in her late seventies, who lives in a township in South Africa. Her income is very little, some US$120 a month in assistance from the government, and her body is old and sore – she is now too old to work. With no savings to draw upon, and no other sources of income, she struggles to afford medication for her chronic ailments. Two of her three children are unemployed, and her grandchildren are hungry and unable to pay the taxi fare to get to their school. This position isn’t atypical in South Africa. There are hundreds of thousands of older adults in the country (8 percent of the total population). Making matters worse, there is a distinct lack of a formal savings culture in the country. Imagine the impossible financial decisions faced by so many elderly South Africans on a daily basis.
There are various reasons for the shortage of savings in South Africa. One of which is the legacy of structural exclusion along racial lines that the pre-democratic regime left behind. During this time, a large part of the population was denied access to basic services and human rights, let alone access to any meaningful financial services.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
Path to Bhutan’s top government offices
In 2014, the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan (RMA), the country’s central bank, made a commitment under the Alliance for Financial Inclusion’s Maya Declaration to develop a national financial inclusion strategy. It backed the overall pledge with specific commitments detailing the main pieces of the strategy. Since then, it has diligently put these pieces into place. Over the past three years, the RMA created regulations for microfinance organizations (deposit-taking and non-deposit taking) and agent banking. It set up a mobile payments system, a credit bureau and a collateral registry. This is an impressive set of accomplishments for a country starting from a relatively blank slate in these areas.
But is it enough? I wonder whether these initiatives will spark the provision of financial services that contribute to the inclusive economic growth Bhutan is seeking.
> Posted by Kettianne Cadet, Lead Analyst, Investing in Inclusive Finance, CFI
“Evolve or die, it is that simple!” remarked Kelvin Twissa, Board Member of FINCA Tanzania. His comments came during a session on Disruption at the recent Africa Board Fellowship (ABF) seminar in Cape Town. In an era where business is definitely not usual, many incumbent financial institutions and their operating models are being threatened by disruptors, and the ability to continuously innovate and evolve has become an increasingly important ingredient for survival.
Graphic harvesting image from May 2017 Africa Board Fellowship Seminar
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Communications Specialist, CFI
Phones are making everything more convenient, but are they also reducing costs? That depends on which service and whose wallet you’re talking about. If it’s the consumer’s mobile money wallet, well, the verdict is still out. In a CGAP paper published last year, Rafe Mazer and Philip Rowen lamented that pricing transparency practices in mobile money services are wholly inadequate across payments, credit, and other product lines. They assert an urgent need for standards and policy to impose better practices on mobile money providers. It’s critical to know how prices are tabulated and what fees are incurred – for the betterment of customers and the industry.
In Kenya, arguably the world’s most robust and dynamic mobile money market, we’ve seen a few recent steps in the right direction.
As of May 2017, per a directive issued by the Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK), telcos and financial institutions providing mobile money services were required to ensure that their users are informed via real-time notifications of the price of their transactions – after they are initiated by the user, but before the transactions are completed and money is transferred. This order by the CAK was permitted to be carried out in stages: first, mobile money providers were asked to let users know the price of their money transfers and bill payments after their transactions occurred; then, providers were required to provide pre-transaction pricing for these two services; and finally, this pre-transaction price disclosure was extended to “value-added” mobile money services like micro-loans and micro-insurance. The new rule applies to mobile money services offered through apps, USSD codes, and SIM toolkits.
You might not think that getting notified about relatively small fees is a big deal. After all, mobile money services in Kenya like M-Pesa are used so often that users probably have a strong grasp on pricing. But this is unclear. When CGAP queried mobile money users in Kenya on M-Pesa pricing changes in 2014, despite claiming to be aware of current pricing figures, many respondents in fact were not.
> Posted by Kimberly Lei Pang, Digital Learning Specialist, UNICEF
In the story of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, the magical word “sesame” was used to open the seal of a cave where Ali Baba found hidden treasure. In China today, the same word is connected to another kind of magic, one that reveals hidden identities of the socially and economically disadvantaged. Sesame Credit (“芝麻信用” in Mandarin) is a product launched by Alibaba that pulls from transaction records on e-commerce platforms to understand a person or company’s creditworthiness. Such innovation in credit scoring is part of the “social credit system” that the Chinese government is building to make up for the longstanding shortage of credit data.
Access to credit, a major indicator of financial inclusion, has gained increasing attention from Chinese policymakers in recent years. For a country experiencing an economic slowdown and widening income gap between the rich and the poor, credit accessibility has the potential to spur growth and level the playing field for the poor. However, despite China’s efforts to improve financial access, a large portion of its population neither uses nor has access to credit. Data from the World Bank’s Global Findex study showed that Chinese people (aged 15+) have relatively high levels of formal bank account ownership (79 percent, 2014) but low levels of credit usage (14 percent, 2014). In fact, China’s formal credit use is the lowest among the five BRICS economies. Aside from the rigidity and costliness of financial institutions, a significant barrier to borrowing is the lack of reliable credit scoring in China. Established just 11 years ago, China’s credit bureau CCRC covers credit profiles for only a quarter of China’s 1.4 billion population and shares that information only with selected banks. Lenders thus often have no access to borrowers’ financial histories and tend to make rather arbitrary decisions on borrowers’ creditworthiness. As a result, many individuals and microenterprises find it difficult to get a loan, as steady employment and collateral assets are commonly required for formal credit.
> Posted by Allyse McGrath, Specialist, CFI
How financially healthy are you? Financial health is a relatively new term in the financial inclusion community, and aims to provide a model for assessing how well one’s daily financial systems enable a person or household to build resilience to shocks and pursue opportunities and dreams. Last month, CFI in collaboration with The Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and Dalberg’s Design Impact Group (DIG) launched the results of a year-long study into how to adapt CFSI’s U.S.-based financial health framework to a developing country, BoP context. The study found that the concept of financial health can be applied to lower-income people in emerging markets, though the indicators and measures of financial health in this context were different. We encourage you to check out the full report, Beyond Financial Inclusion: Financial Health as a Global Framework, to learn more about our financial health framework for the developing world.
We also encourage you to engage with your own financial health in order to get a better grasp on the concept. To better understand the concept ourselves, CFI and Accion staff (building on the work of our year-long study and on the U.S. Financial Health Framework of CFSI) recently participated in an organization-wide financial health survey. Over 120 Accionistas took the survey and received assessments of their financial health. After reviewing the responses, we have uncovered some interesting insights into how people’s debts evolve as they age and the diverse set of tools they are using to manage their financial lives.
As a next step in the process of understanding, we want to share this survey with you. We hope it will help you both engage with the concept of financial health and potentially improve your own financial health. We also hope your feedback will help us strengthen our framework and this tool. Finally, we look forward to reporting back soon on the financial health of CFI’s (anonymous) blog readers!
> Posted by Kyle Burgess, Executive Director and Editor in Chief, Consumers Research
Image Credit: FamZoo Staff. No alterations made. CC BY-SA 2.0
Digital currencies, such as Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain protocol, introduce a technical platform for a new global payment infrastructure that has the potential to level the playing field for the 2.5 billion people across the globe who are unbanked or underbanked. The immutable and distributed nature of digital currencies and a number of the platforms built on top of blockchain protocols can provide improved security, efficiency, affordability, privacy, and transparency in financial transactions, as well as a whole host of other transfers of value or information. Furthermore, thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, blockchain-based digital currencies can even remove the middleman, and serve as a bank in your pocket. However, fully removing a third party intermediary comes with significant risks, as there’s no one to call if you lose your private key (which functions as your password), break your hardware wallet (which acts as your digital vault), or want to dispute a payment because the goods you purchased are damaged (because digital currency transactions are irreversible). Like any other product, consumer protection must be at the forefront of the development and implementation of digital currency and blockchain-based financial services.
> Posted by Tess Johnson, Project Associate, CFI
Photo credit: Xavier Arnau
Despite the excitement about moving mobile financial services (MFS) to a richer smartphone-based environment, we still have a long way to go before many customers at the base of the pyramid can reap the full benefits of these technologies. CFI Fellow Leon Perlman diligently identified many of the key obstacles for more inclusive MFS, including the lack of infrastructure to support the higher-speed mobile connectivity critical for MFS transactions; the plethora of substandard and/or cost-prohibitive smartphones in developing countries; and pervasive security vulnerabilities that threaten MFS transactions, to name a few.
There are some bright spots in Leon’s report, however, and we think it’s important to acknowledge them.
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