There’s no arguing that quality data is essential to achieving full financial inclusion. But of course if we want data to have an actual impact, it’s what we do with it that counts. The new Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) Interactive Map from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation incorporates financial inclusion data, country-specific supply-side data to be exact, into an interactive map with the aim of helping to identify gaps in access to financial services, to assist in designing policy, and to inform decision-making.

The tool uses GIS location data on financial access points – commercial banks, ATMs, microfinance institutions, mobile money agents, credit institutions, and post offices, among others – layered onto high resolution maps to create a visual representation of the financial services landscape for a given country. In addition to access points, the tool is able to display a country’s mobile coverage, urban areas, state lines, poorer areas, and population densities. The map is outfitted with a calculation tool that lets you generate numbers on financial services access, broken down in a number of ways including percentage of population covered, and urban or rural area. The countries currently available are Nigeria, Uganda, and Tanzania. Here’s a video of the tool in action.

The Power of Mapping Financial Services Data, a paper that describes the tool in greater detail and offers ideas on how it can be used to inform decision-making, was released last month. The paper lists the following points, broken down by stakeholder types, for how it might be used.

• Service Providers. To optimize the Cash-In and Cash-Out agent network expansion, improve liquidity management, identify new potential customers and market products, assess proximity and scale of competitors/partners.
• Government Agencies. To design effective social transfer programs and incentives for the private sector to extend their offer to underserved and unserved areas. E.g. government cash-transfer programs – payments to government employees, pension, and safety-net payments.
• Policy-makers and Regulators. Design efficient policies for financial inclusion and monitor their implementation. Provides financial market data and information to guide the market players in designing products, identifying opportunities, and responding to constraints/challenges.
• Donors and Development Partners. To evaluate impact/outreach of financial inclusion initiatives. Create a geo-referenced information base – enable sector coordination and leverage. E.g. agricultural/health synergies with financial services.

The FSP Interactive Map is currently in beta, and the Gates Foundation welcomes feedback, to be given here. Bangladesh and Kenya will be added to the tool this coming September. Another coming attraction will be data on travel time to an access point to supplement the current data on distance to an access point.

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On Tuesday, in conjunction with the release of our second FI2020 Mapping the Invisible Market report, Growing Income, Growing Inclusion: How Rising Incomes at the Base of the Pyramid Will Shape Financial Inclusion, we hosted a live, interactive webcast with MasterCard. The webcast explored the relationship between rising incomes and financial inclusion, including the opportunity for inclusion presented by the emergence of the “vulnerable class.” The session also spotlighted the Mapping the Invisible Market interactive data tools (available here and here), as well as MasterCard’s work in supporting financial inclusion globally.

Hosted by MasterCard’s Nicole Ward, the webcast’s presenters were CFI’s Sonja Kelly and Elisabeth Rhyne, and MasterCard’s Tara Nathan. Here’s a few of the points that were made during the discussion.

• Rising incomes, changing demographics, advances in technology, and government engagement are factors that are coming together to further financial inclusion
• Global GDP has been growing for the past 30 years, with a projected increase from $61 trillion in 2010 to $85 trillion in 2020
• From 2010 to 2020, the annual income of the bottom 40 percent in low and middle income economies is projected to double, from $3.1 trillion to $5.8 trillion
• In many populous countries, the BOP will move into the vulnerable class in this decade
• At the country level, there is a strong correlation between income and financial inclusion, both in account ownership and account use
• There are many possible on-ramps to financial inclusion, including bill pay, G2P payments, no-frills accounts, and mobile money transfer
• The transition from informal to formal financial services depends on many factors, including income level, income flow, employment formality, and social relationships
• Incorporating the vast influx of new clients requires scaling up client protection and financial education
• MasterCard is working with the government of Nigeria on a national ID program to provide a single proof of identity that also has the ability to deposit, receive, withdraw, and pay

For a video of the full webcast, click here. For the new Growing Income, Growing Inclusion report, click here.

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Remember when you were young, and a sandbox presented an opportunity to build your own castle? The GPFI (the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion) Basic Set of Financial Inclusion Indicators and its accompanying website is kind of like that—it offers a space in which users can customize and test their own definitions of financial inclusion through an interactive platform, building off of a set of key “ingredients” in the data world.

We’ve talked before about the GPFI’s “Basic Set,” but we wanted to be sure to highlight it again, given the attention that it has received over the past few weeks alongside its official release on April 21 at the 2013 World Bank Spring Meetings.

In offering this service, the GPFI addresses one of the biggest challenges in financial inclusion: measurement. We all seem to have a general definition of financial inclusion, but when it comes to operationalizing this definition, things get complicated. Should the use of financial services be an individual or a household measure? How can we parse out (and should we parse out) financial tools used for businesses from tools used for personal things? Are surveys run by international organizations the best source of data or are numbers reported by central banks more reliable? The Basic Set remains fairly agnostic on these questions, instead giving highlights from all of the data—SME, personal, supply-side, demand-side, international organization-led, and government-reported.

See, for example, the diversity of indicators in the GPFI Basic Set as applied to sub-Saharan Africa. “Accounts” includes a demand-side (individual) measure of accounts, SME accounts, and both measures for women in particular.

The recent explosion of data in the financial inclusion space can make it difficult to know where to go for the numbers you need. The GPFI, however, puts all of the data into one central location. Within the platform, you can download the visualizations, share indicators, and download and save the data (all using the World Bank’s DataBank platform).

Most importantly for those of us who cannot seem to get enough data on financial inclusion, this Basic Set will be giving rise to a more robust set of financial inclusion indicators, including nuanced data specific to certain country contexts, financial inclusion regulations, and more. So watch this “sandbox”—there is more to come!

For an overview of the Basic Set, click here. To explore the data, visit the GPFI here.

Image credit: GPFI

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Measuring Financial Inclusion: The “Basic Set” Solution

We bring you… DATA!

There’s a lot of data out there. And some of us are brave enough to use it (including you, my friend).

Recently we released an interactive Data Explorer tool and individual Country Profiles, allowing users to visually explore financial inclusion data in comparison with other development indicators in one central location. You can see our analysis of some of the data, but more importantly, we would like to invite you to explore the data for yourself.

For those interested in financial inclusion figures in specific countries, regions, or income groups of interest, visit Country Profiles. There we display data from the Global Findex along with demographic data relevant to understanding financial inclusion across the lifecycle. As we continue our own analysis of global trends, we will add figures on income, urbanization, technology, and more for each country.

Click on the financial inclusion bars to see a breakdown of the data by client segment, and use the tool to understand why or how people use financial services in particular countries. At the bottom of the page, you can interact with the demographic data by scrolling through the years to see past and projected population trends from 1950 to 2100. (This is very cool.)

For those who want a data adventure, driven by an interest in specific issues or factors, we suggest you go to Data Explorer. Data are now available from the UN on demography, the Findex on financial inclusion, as well as the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, with more to be added in the coming months.

Data Explorer is built on Google’s platform, and lets users choose the type of graph they want to look at, add up to four variables, plot the data on a map, and more. For datasets that include more than one year, you can “play” a video of the variable changing over time (look for the triangle in the bottom left hand corner). If you have a hypothesis you want to investigate, this is the place to go.

For example, I’ve been wondering for some time now if mobile phone penetration translates into the use of mobile phones for banking. I plotted, therefore, mobile phone subscriptions against the percent of people that use mobile phones to receive money. Each dot represents a country, and I colored the countries by their income group (as determined by the World Bank). I found something quite surprising:

There really doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship in 2011 between mobile phone subscriptions and the percent of people who use a mobile phone to receive money. This raises the question of what prompts mobile phone banking to take root in a financial culture.

Over the coming months, we’ll be posting observations and analyses that emerge from the use of these tools. If you find something that you want to share, feel free to contact us. We’re looking forward to hearing stories from the data adventures our users take.

For more information on Financial Inclusion 2020, sign up for campaign updates.

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