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> Posted by Susy Cheston, Senior Advisor, CFI
The Credit Reporting section of the FI2020 e-zine (click to read)
The Financial Inclusion 2020 Round-Up 2014 e-zine, found on the CFI website, takes a look at progress toward financial inclusion in the year following the FI2020 Global Forum. It was at the Global Forum that five Roadmaps to Financial Inclusion were presented after two years of being developed and debated by dozens of financial inclusion experts. Now, imagine the editorial challenge of collapsing a year’s worth of activity around each Roadmap into just two pages each.
While it’s a fun read, I admit to a little cognitive dissonance as I page through the Round-Up. The brief analyses of where we stand around each of the Roadmaps to Financial Inclusion can be summed up in the quote “we’re not as far along as we think we are.” While that quote was about the Technology Roadmap, it could just as easily be said of the other Roadmaps: Financial Capability, Addressing Customer Needs, Client Protection, and Credit Reporting.
Yet despite the clear-eyed look at the ongoing challenges, the e-zine also tells a story of intense and productive activity by a wide range of actors. Legacy financial service providers—the heavy hitters with big resources and even greater reach—are investing heavily in financial inclusion. It’s not just for corporate social responsibility any more; it’s part of a new business strategy inspired by the discovery of an untapped and (they hope) profitable new market. Sprinkled in and around those vignettes are stories of scrappy start-ups doing the social entrepreneurship thing. Some of those services may not make it past 2015, but some of them have a “why didn’t I think of that” inevitability about them. The diversity of actors and the energy are impressive.
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This is our second response to the provocative post two weeks ago from Ignacio Mas. Ignacio asks why the “current innovation frenzy in digital financial services in the U.S.” does not translate into action in BoP markets across the world, and puts forth a number of hypotheses.
“In other words, why is there such an inherent innovation deficit within the very commercial ventures that we think are going to drive financial inclusion forward? Do market players really need this very granular level of handholding to get what academics, NGOs, and donors so clearly believe in? …Or is the problem, rather, that there isn´t enough of a competitive push to drive them to want to innovate as a key source of market advantage?”
What follows is a response from Gerhard Coetzee, who leads the CGAP Customers at the Centre Team.
In considering the question posed by Ignacio Mas, I am reminded of the work of business strategist C.C. Markides. He did not see it as “the great competition and innovation deficit” question, but rather, the challenge of how large institutions make two business models exist in the same organization. In fact, the question is how to serve two distinct market segments in the same institution. He notes that the large industry players that develop new radical business models are exceptions rather than the rule. Most innovations and market changing models are introduced by newcomers to that industry.
Why don’t we see the large financial service providers (FSPs), who have the ability to change things at scale, jump into this area of the market and deliver solutions to low-income and poor customers even where regulation may enable them to engage? In essence the argument focuses on product centricity, incomplete business cases, an over-emphasis on the supplier view of cost to serve, short-termism of incentive structures, and competition for resources in large organizations. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Tyler Owens, CFI Staff
The current era of financial services for the poor is marked by the growth of high-tech delivery mechanisms, innovative start-ups, new socially responsible investing models, and more traditional banks growing their portfolios of base-of-the-pyramid clients. Different players in increasingly crowded markets often collide in trying to win over more clients. Just one recent example is the newly public Alibaba, which has issued more than $16 billion in small loans over the last three years through its SME loan company AliFinance. The result of all this can lead one to question the role that traditional MFIs will play in the years and decades ahead. What will be their unique value proposition and how will they earn and maintain market share and the loyalty of their clients?
There is evidence that microfinance industry practitioners and stakeholders are not prioritizing questions of relevance and long-term customer retention. All too often, thinking strategically about the place of an MFI in a rapidly changing financial services landscape takes a back seat to the daily crush of competition and loan book performance. The 2014 Microfinance Banana Skins report—which is built on surveys of industry practitioners and insiders—concluded that the most urgent risks the industry faces are those of day-to-day business operations, such as credit control, competition, and management quality. The report went on to say that “longer term risks associated with the survival and evolution of the industry such as technological change, product development and funding are considered to be less urgent – and are less well defined.” It concluded that paying scant attention to long-term risks in the industry—at a crucial point in its development—may be a serious risk in itself.
> Posted by Alexandra Rizzi, Deputy Director, the Smart Campaign
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Close to Washington, D.C.’s antipode in Perth, Australia I attended the Fifth Annual Responsible Finance Forum, which this year focused on responsible digital finance. The organizers assembled an impressive mix of representatives from all three legs of the responsible finance stool – industry, regulators, and consumers. A number of familiar risk areas were examined during the two great days of presentations, debate, and discussion, and three prominent themes emerged for me: the centrality of the service agent, the increasing importance of financial education, and considering responsible finance at the ecosystem level.
The first day of the forum focused on the identification of risks to consumers from digital financial services (DFS) and the second day was framed around how to mitigate and minimize those risks. An online “Global Pulse Survey” that CGAP conducted as well as some demand-side research conducted by MicroSave and Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) brought both the practitioner and consumer perspectives on DFS risks to the forefront. The MicroSave and BFA research canvassed nearly 700 DFS users and 50 non-users through focus groups in Colombia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Uganda. While respondents of the survey and focus groups identified a wide variety of harms or worries, some common items emerged, listed in the table below. Though preliminary, this data is extremely important in helping us frame the areas where stakeholders could focus to mitigate against client harm and risk. These risks fall squarely into the framework of the Smart Campaign’s seven Client Protection Principles, furthering our belief that a principles framework can carry forward into digital financial services.
> Posted by Juan Blanco, Associate, Financial Inclusion 2020, CFI
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In 2012, developed countries spent 8.6 percent of GDP on insurance, while developing countries spent only 2.7 percent. Traditional insurance providers face difficulties when serving low-income and unbanked customers with traditional insurance products in areas like transaction size, client education, and outreach, among others. However, mobile technologies have disrupted the way insurance is delivered and in the last two years a new array of mobile microinsurance services have popped up. Earlier this year CGAP identified 74 operators with live mobile microinsurance services, making up an increasingly diverse space that is active in more countries, offering a wider range of products, and using different business models.
Two of these services stand out, given their success, both with leading mobile network operators (MNOs). Tigo Kiiray in Senegal enrolled 13 percent of Tigo’s 3 million subscriber base during its first year and a half of its launch. Talkshawk Mohafiz by Telenor Pakistan managed to issue 400,000 insurance policies within its first two months of operations. What have these models done to gain access to this historically difficult market segment?
> Posted by Rafe Mazer, Financial Sector Specialist, Government & Policy, CGAP
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It’s a great time to be working on consumer protection. Even while risks change or expand in scope as new products evolve and access increases, it seems that there are just as many talented researchers and new approaches to making consumer protection work emerging. Some of the most important breakthroughs are coming from consumer and behavioral research. This includes insights into what sales staff really do and why (see, for example, this infographic on a recent World Bank/CGAP/CONDUSEF audit study in Mexico), how consumers make financial decisions—not always for purely economic reasons, and what the context of low resources or scarcity means for financial behavior.
The next step is to take these research insights and turn them into improved consumer protection policies in emerging markets. CGAP’s recent publication, Applying Behavioral Insights in Consumer Protection Policy, describes a range of current and potential ways we can bridge the research and policy fields. But what about providers? What can we take from the recent behavioral insights emerging for the Client Protection Principles?
> Posted by Kim Wilson, Fellow, Center for Emerging Market Enterprises and the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University
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“Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” This aphorism credited to Albert Einstein inspires our call to Lean Research.
Two Fridays ago at MIT a group of 50 of us met to hash out some principles that, if followed, might generate better research in development and social science contexts. NGOs, universities, foundations, corporations, government, and multi-lateral agencies were represented in our group.
Our analogy of choice was Toyota. If “the Toyota way,” or lean manufacturing as it has come to be called, could cause profound and beneficial disruptions in production processes, might lean research cause equally profound and beneficial disruptions in research processes?
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
Rwanda has a lot to celebrate in terms of financial inclusion these days. Last week in Kigali the National Bank of Rwanda (NBR) hosted a conference in partnership with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) commemorating their 50-year anniversary. At the event, titled Financial Inclusion for Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development, NBR Governor John Rwangombwa highlighted the country’s recent rise in access levels, from 48 to 72 percent between 2008 and 2012 across formal and informal providers. Rwanda now has the laudable goal of increasing this figure to 90 percent by 2020. To help it get there, on Friday the World Bank launched a $2.25 million program supporting key financial inclusion areas for the country.
Along with overall exclusion rates dropping from 52 to 28 percent over 2008 to 2012, formal services access increased from 21 to 42 percent during the same period, according to the 2012 FinScope Rwanda Survey. The new government goal of 90 percent access by 2020 is an extension of the country’s Maya Declaration Commitment of 80 percent access by 2017. Rwanda’s growth in formal access can be attributed to products offered by both banks and non-bank providers, like the country’s community savings and credit cooperatives known as Umurenge SACCOs. Over the past three years, Umurenge SACCOs have attracted over 1.6 million customers. Ninety percent of Rwandans live within a 5 km radius of one of the cooperatives. Countrywide, the number of MFIs, including Umurenge SACCOs, increased from 125 to 491 between 2008 and December 2013. Elsewhere in the sector, over the last three years, the number of banks increased from 10 to 14, the number of insurance companies increased from 9 to 13, and the number of pension providers increased from 41 to 56.
> Posted by Jamie M. Zimmerman, Senior Policy Consultant, CGAP
Achieving financial inclusion by 2020 will depend in large part on the proliferation of fast, affordable, and accessible digital financial services (DFS). Indeed these effective, scalable models were a clear theme at the FI2020 Global Forum hosted by CFI last fall. Yet as excitement for DFS dominated much of the public discussion, a small and diverse set of financial inclusion leaders convened a private side-meeting to discuss an often-overlooked question: what are the consumer risks to these new, innovative digital models?
The meeting, co-hosted by CGAP and UNCDF’s Better Than Cash Alliance, introduced the concept of “responsible digital finance” and revealed heightened awareness of and interest in an array of issues related to the potential consumer risks of digital financial services, including:
Read the rest of this entry »
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