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> Posted by Juan Blanco, Associate, Financial Inclusion 2020, CFI
Mobile money services have spread like wildfire, making people less cash-reliant and able to easily carry out transactions like bill payments and money transfers. GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked program identified 14 mobile money sprinters – leaders of some of the fastest growing mobile deployments in the world. Among these, three case studies from mobile money services in Pakistan, Somaliland, and Zimbabwe have been published. The case studies highlight the reasons why these particular schemes have achieved significant customer bases and transactions volumes since their deployments.
Easypaisa (Pakistan). After only 11 months, Easypaisa registered 5 million transactions and by the end of 2012 it had 100 million transactions with a volume of $US 1.4 billion. Easypaisa was created in late 2009 by the MNO Telenor Pakistan and Tameer Bank, after Telenor acquired a 51 percent stake in Tameer. Telenor acknowledged that launching a mobile wallet product wouldn’t be the ideal way to set up Easypaisa since they only had a 22 percent market share and so the product wouldn’t encompass 40 million non-Telenor customers. Furthermore, regulations in the country called for very comprehensive Know-Your-Customer (KYC) procedures, creating the additional obstacles of increased registration cost and time.
> Posted by Amit Jain, Principal, Global Thought Leadership, MasterCard Advisors
The Financial Inclusion 2020 project at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
As an avid advocate of financial inclusion, I am deeply saddened by the fact that several hundred years after the first bank opened, 50 percent of the global adult population still lacks access to formal financial services.
The good news is that this may not be the case any longer. So I eagerly read the recent paper from Elisabeth Rhyne and Sonja Kelly from the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion that talks about how growing incomes could lead to growing inclusion. I am glad that the authors have brought this phenomenon to the forefront.
I agree that rising incomes could be a key catalyst for elevating financial inclusion globally. I have experienced firsthand the tectonic shift in the income profiles and demand for financial services in India reflected in data from the United Nations Statistics Division. It shows that the percent of the population below the poverty line in India has dropped from 45 percent in 1994 to less than 30 percent in 2010. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly, Fellow, CFI
When we talk about “on-ramps” to financial inclusion, we are engaging with the idea that there are “entrance points” to the road that will take us to global inclusion, just as there are ways to access a highway to get people closer to their final destinations. We’ve already blogged about a number of different on-ramps: payroll loans, post office service points, savings groups, and mobile money, to name a few.
MasterCard’s Amit Jain and Gidget Hall explore another on-ramp: electronic bill payment.
I would venture to say that most people do not find bill pay exciting. In my house, the prospect of paying bills is a subject that tends to trigger groaning and deferral.
However, Jain and Hall observe that bill payment is a financial management exercise that is common among most people, including those with no existing banking relationships. They argue that of any potential on-ramp to financial inclusion, bill pay is the most common across the world. In addition, they note that bill payment is a regularly recurring process, which, if approached as an on-ramp to financial inclusion, could contribute to a habit of efficient and effective financial management.
From a supply-side perspective, electronic bill payment has the potential to benefit a range of players including retailers, banks, billers, and aggregators. Working together, under this logic, would benefit all of the parties. For example, billers could lower their costs associated with accepting payments at their physical offices, banks could engage and acquire customers, and the government could reduce the black economy and make transactions easier to track.
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