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> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly, CFI
A couple months ago we announced a new program coming out of the Center for Financial Inclusion and Accion designed to produce actionable research for the microfinance and financial inclusion industry. We’ve been busy since, overwhelmed by the positive response we had to our announcement, and torn between many high-quality research proposals.
In recent days we selected four fellows to carry out research that we think will have an influence on the future of financial inclusion. Without further adieu, I would like to introduce you to…
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> Posted by Center Staff
Unless you’re with one of the few organizations working to combat youth financial exclusion, you probably don’t hear much about the issue. A few weeks ago, the world celebrated Global Money Week, which is gaining encouraging participation and engagement. Sadly, aside from this annual blitz of activity, there isn’t much in the airwaves on expanding financial access to this hugely underserved client segment. According to the Global Findex, in higher-income countries, 42 percent of youth save in financial institutions. The next highest regions are East Asia & Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa, where this rate is 19 and 9 percent respectively. During our youth, financial services and financial education help us save for the future, form good money management behaviors, and navigate life transitions like getting an education and starting a family.
The MasterCard Foundation, as spotlighted in a recently released report, has been quietly busy these past seven years working to address this shortcoming. Since 2008, the Foundation in partnership with six organizations has worked with over 30 financial services providers and non-profits to expand youth access to banking services. The new report, Financial Services for Young People: Prospects and Challenges, reviews the MasterCard Foundation’s youth financial inclusion projects for insights and learning to inform future industry efforts.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
The following post was originally published on the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth blog.
Reaching full financial inclusion by 2020 will require supportive policies in every country around the globe. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Global Microscope on Financial Inclusion, 2014” assesses the policy environment for financial inclusion in 55 countries. The Microscope examines 12 policy dimensions essential for creating an inclusion-friendly regulatory and institutional framework. The rigorous model incorporates input from hundreds of policy makers and participants in the financial sector and a review of existing policies and implementation. The resulting rankings represent the best readily available source for judging the state of financial inclusion policy around the world.
What’s surprising about the 2014 Microscope results is their wide range. Out of a possible 100 points, the top scorer (Peru) received 87 while the lowest (Haiti) earned only 16. If full inclusion requires good policies, it is disappointing to learn that the median score across all countries was a mediocre 46.
> Posted by Center Staff
On Wednesday, a new joint-initiative was launched that puts free financial education lessons into the phones of Tigo’s seven million mobile subscribers in Colombia. The service, Su Dinero (Your Money), features online financial education content from Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) tailored to the local Colombian context. Supported by project partners DAI and Souktel, the financial education platform is housed on Facebook’s Internet.org phone application. Though web-based, the app can be accessed by Tigo’s mobile subscribers without cost or data charges due to the businesses’ unique arrangement, aligned with Internet.org’s social mission: extending affordable internet access to the five billion people around the world who don’t have it.
Less than a third of the global population use internet-based financial or commercial services. By and large this isn’t a reflection of a lack of connectivity, as mobile phone reception now covers about 85 percent of the inhabited world, although smart phones penetration is far lower. Internet.org, founded by Facebook in 2013, is out to make internet access 100-times more affordable and increase uptake worldwide by targeting the following barriers: cost of devices; cost of service plans; lack of content in local languages; limited availability of power sources; difficulty in networks supporting large amounts of data; lack of awareness of the value of the internet; and remaining gaps in mobile network connectivity.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, Fellow, CFI
Marisol is a 69-year-old woman in Aguablanca, a mid-sized community near the coast in Colombia. She hasn’t saved much for her older years. She receives a small social pension—about a dollar per day—from the public pension program, Colombia Mayor. While it provides an income floor for her, Marisol would like to be working as an entrepreneur. She even has a plan: “If I had a little capital, I could buy chicken legs, beef, and bananas here at a cheap price and then sell them in the Pacific towns at three or four times the price. And then I could bring back fish from the coast to sell here at the fairs.” But she cannot get a loan because of the age caps on credit at the financial institutions that operate in her area.
Marisol explains that it is not her lack of zeal or a declining health that is keeping her from increasing her income through this business dream of hers. “Strength and desire do not fail me,” she says. “It’s the money that I lack.”
Marisol was one of the people that we interviewed as part of the creation of an issue paper on Aging and Financial Inclusion, a project conducted by the Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign and in collaboration with HelpAge International. Her story is not unique—many older people report being denied access to credit and insurance in their later years. Most older people who had low or informal income when they were younger have not saved for their older years.
The new paper examines the unmet financing needs of older adults, a population segment growing rapidly in developing countries. With a focus on Latin America, the paper discusses the barriers to and market opportunities in expanding financial access to aging populations.
> Posted by Center Staff
Yesterday a digital finance event in Bogota hosted by the Colombian government and the Better Than Cash Alliance celebrated a pioneering business-to-business electronic banking program that’s led to over 300,000 Colombian coffee farmers receiving access to formal banking services. Launched in 2006 by the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC), the Smart Coffee ID Card program offers the farmers represented by FNC with a dual identification/e-banking card that can be used for payments, debits, and savings. It now encompasses over 8 million transactions totaling nearly $1 billion. The event launched a Better Than Cash Alliance case study on the Smart Coffee ID Card program, which finds that the FNC initiative is a benchmark example of how transitioning from cash to e-payments in emerging economies can lead to increased safety, productivity, growth, and greater quality of life.
> Posted by Juan Blanco, Associate, Financial Inclusion 2020, CFI
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In the client protection section of the FI2020 Roadmap to Financial Inclusion, a specific recommendation was made for financial providers to embrace consumer protection as part of their professional identity, and applying a “financial consumer bill of rights” was identified as a key action point.
Looking into the state of this industry area for our upcoming FI2020 Progress Report on Financial Inclusion, I came to realize that the subject of consumers’ bills of rights is not as straightforward as it seems. Although the recommendation from the roadmap was aimed specifically at providers, the truth is that this is an area where a diversity of players is getting involved. I found a range of approaches: codes of conduct, codes of ethics, charters of rights, and bills of rights, coming from a wide spread of stakeholders, from MFIs to global associations to governments. At the heart of each of these initiatives was the same objective: for service providers to operate ethically and responsibly.
> Posted by Kaj Malden, Consultant, PlaNet Finance China
For China’s young microfinance sector, which could benefit from more regulatory oversight and transparency, ratings have the potential to catalyze healthy growth. Efforts to incorporate ratings throughout the country’s market, however, have so far been largely ineffectual. A new report from PlaNet Finance China and Planet Rating, The Role of Microfinance Ratings in the Sustainable Development of China’s Financial Inclusion Sector, part of PlaNet Finance and Credit Suisse’s “Microfinance Robustness Program”, outlines how ratings could provide welcome growth and strengthening for Chinese microfinance, and describes the current obstacles that stand in the way.
Mainstream ratings systems evaluate creditworthiness of debt and financial products for companies. They also contribute to setting benchmarks for the wider financial services industry. Specialized microfinance rating agencies evaluate some of the same qualities traditional rating agencies do, but they are trained in microfinance and investigate other financial inclusion-specific indicators, such as social performance. Microfinance ratings function as institutional ratings, not credit ratings, as in the case of mainstream ratings. These more nuanced ratings for the microfinance sector first emerged in Latin America, where microfinance boomed in the late 1990s.
> Posted by Ana Ruth Medina, Lead Specialist, Accion
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It is not a secret that, in Latin America, we are behind in terms of savings culture. Too few microfinance institutions offer savings. Among the savings accounts that do exist, dormancy is widespread. Compared to other regions, the average deposit in Latin America is quite large¹, illustrating that the institutions that do offer savings aren’t necessarily serving the underserved client segment. For the last four years, Accion partnered with financial institutions in Latin America, in a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in order to mobilize savings at the base of the pyramid (BoP). The objective of this project, beyond impacting the lives of thousands of clients, of course, was to strengthen the institutional capacity within Accion’s partner organizations to expand beyond their focus on lending. How successful were we?
Some overarching results of the project included: four new savings products (one received the 2013 Accenture Prize for Innovation); implementation of institution-wide communication, education and brand models; and creation of distribution channels for deposits (including ATM’s, non-banking correspondents, and branches specialized in savings). Best of all: enrollment of more than 700,000 new and active savings clients.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
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Last week the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) announced substantial increases throughout the country’s microfinance market: growth in the volume of loans dispersed to microentrepreneurs, in the number of microcredit institutions offering savings services, and in the return on equity of rural banks with microfinance operations. Concerning regulation and institutional support, the recently released 2014 Global Microscope found that the Philippines has the best environment in Asia for financial inclusion.
In 2014, loans extended to microentrepreneurs in the Philippines totaled P9.3 billion (US$209 million) as of June, according to figures reported by BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr. at the recent Citi Microentrepreneurship Awards in Manila – a roughly 7 percent increase over last year’s figure. On savings, in early 2012 only 22 banks in the country offered micro-deposit accounts. Now, 69 of the Philippines’ 183 banks with microcredit operations take deposits, with a total of 1.7 million micro-deposit accounts. Beyond credit and savings, 86 of the country’s institutions offering microcredit also provide microinsurance and 26 provide electronic banking services.
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