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> Posted by Camilla Nestor, Vice President of Microfinance Programs at Grameen Foundation

This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.

In five years, how will the poor be accessing financial services?  If we could step back in time to 2006 with the microfinance sector scaling rapidly across the globe, it would have been hard to imagine that today mobile money users would outstrip all banked individuals in some countries, or that in other countries commercial banks would have overtaken microfinance institution (MFI) outreach to the poor in just a few years.

CGAP reports that 2.7 billion people globally remain unbanked around the world, a gap that requires a depth and breadth of financial services to truly address.  We’ve learned that scale alone is not the answer; it must be accompanied by approaches that keep client well-being at the center.  However, we still have not found an approach that meets this challenge in a way that addresses both scale and client needs at the same time.  There are a number of intriguing scenarios for how the poor could be accessing appropriate financial products and services in the future, all of which draw on players beyond the traditional microfinance space.  Here are three potential scenarios: Read the rest of this entry »