You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Digital Finance’ tag.
> Posted by Kim Wilson, the Fletcher School, Tufts University
Today, I used my smartphone to pound tiny nails into a wall. The procedure worked well enough to hang a small picture, but it cracked my phone case.
I wasn’t trying to go digital by using a mobile device. I simply could not find the proper tool – a hammer. The episode made me think that going hammer-lite would be silly for a pounding task. I really needed a hammer. If I were trying to tighten a screw, a task I just had to do on a door handle, I suppose I could go screwdriver-lite. I could try to wedge a tag of the broken phone casing into the screw’s octagonal chamber, then give it a twist. It might work. But an Allen wrench might work better.
So, in financial inclusion why are we trying to go “cash-lite?” Cash can be a sturdy pair of pliers that turn income into neat, countable paper stacks – one pushed into the desk drawer for buying groceries and another plopped into a tin for evenings out. Cash can also be a wrench, torqued just so, to help us make sure that we have enough coins to pay the parking attendant or enough paper to pay ourselves when we feel the need to devise a personal austerity plan.
As customers, we really don’t want to go wrench-lite, hammer-lite, or even cash-lite. We just want the best tools possible.
Though the financial inclusion industry trumpets customer-centricity – putting the customer at the center of our decisions about how to best serve them – how it goes about this endeavor is baffling. One might presume that a good method would be to ask the customer what task she wants to perform and then find or make the best tools to help her, as this video suggests. But, for the most part, that’s not our way. We constantly urge – “get an account, go cash-lite” – ignoring a lack in evidence that otherwise might prove: going digital increases income equality, growth, and customer happiness. In fact, the opposite has been documented.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Communications Associate, CFI
GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) program recently released the report ‘Mobile Financial Services in Latin America & the Caribbean’, spotlighting the region’s booming mobile money activity. I talked with the report’s authors, Mireya Almazán and Jennifer Frydrych, to learn more about the project. The first half of our conversation follows. The second half of the conversation will be published in the coming days.
One of the headline messages of the new report is that the mobile money market in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is the fastest growing of any region in terms of account ownership. How do the numbers look?
Collectively, the 37 mobile money services in the region account for roughly 15 million registered mobile money accounts and 6.2 million accounts that have been active within the past 90-days. Notably, LAC witnessed a 50 percent growth rate in the number of new registered mobile money accounts between December 2013 and 2014, making LAC the world’s fastest growing region in new accounts. LAC’s users are more active than the global average active customer rate (42 percent of all accounts are active, compared to 35 percent globally). Most encouragingly, there are now five deployments in LAC with over a million registered customers. Each of these deployments counts at least half a million 90-day active customers, and together they cover an extremely diverse set of markets.
The three markets that stand out in the region are Paraguay, Honduras, and El Salvador. These three markets all feature in the top 15 globally for mobile money account penetration (number of active mobile money accounts divided by total adult population).
> Posted by Center Staff
Hot off the press! We published the third issue of the Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed, our new weekly online magazine on the big news in financial inclusion. What’s been happening in the world of banking the unbanked?
Among its stories, the new issue of the FI2020 News Feed spotlights the following:
- The State Bank of Pakistan ordered all commercial banks in the country to create a new account category, Asaan Account, which targets the base of the pyramid by simplifying account opening requirements
- Mybank, a new online bank in China, was launched by Ant Financial, utilizing transaction records on Alibaba to extend credit to individuals and small businesses
- In Tanzania, agent and mobile phone-based banking continues to grow steadily in both the volume and value of transactions
For more details on these and other stories, read the third issue here, and make sure to subscribe by entering your email address in the right-hand menu so you can be notified when the latest issue comes out.
Have you come across a story or initiative you think we should cover? Email your ideas to us at .
PERC, a “think and do tank” advancing financial inclusion through information services, has been effective in addressing credit invisibility by advocating the use of alternative data in credit reporting, including in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, and the U.S. We invited Michael Turner, PERC’s CEO, to submit an opinion piece, and are publishing the results in a three-part series. The following is part one.
#167671012 / gettyimages.com
Recently, a number of players have flaunted an impressive array of promising digital technologies to expand credit access, advertising nothing less than a full on revolution in financial inclusion. While the promise of many of these solutions is inarguable, in most cases they are limited to lower-value, higher-interest consumption loans at best, or, at worst, are at risk of being useless as they suffer from the classic error of putting the cart before the horse. The principle limitation on these solutions is a lack of access to sufficient quantities of regularly reported, high-quality, predictive data upon which to base credit decisions and develop credit products.
Consider the case of Safaricom, which revolutionized the payment systems market in Kenya with its M-Pesa offering. The rapid uptake of M-Pesa by lower-income Kenyans was proof positive of the value of digital financial services and spawned a wave of investment into hundreds of copycat service providers around the world.
> Posted by Center Staff
This edition of top picks features posts highlighting India’s financial inclusion progress and persisting gaps, how the deployment of digital financial systems requires strategic human capital management, and the state of the mobile money industry in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The proportion of adults in India with a bank account increased from 35 to 53 percent between 2011 and 2014, according to the recently-released Global Findex data. A new post on the IFMR LEAD blog shares the Findex findings for India, and outlines the ways in which financial inclusion in the country is still far from achieved. The post affirms that account ownership is just the first step towards inclusion, discussing account usage, gender disparity, and uptake of mobile services, among other topics.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Communications Associate, CFI
#466499236 / gettyimages.com
In most countries, you don’t hear much buzz about business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce. In the United States, for example, our eCommerce goliaths of the moment are Amazon and eBay, which focus on the business-to-consumer (B2C) segment. But this isn’t the case in China, where the B2B eCommerce industry is ballooning and drawing the rest of the world in. It grew by 32 percent to US$ 3.76 billion in revenue in 2014, and in the coming years the revenue growth rate is expected to stay over 20 percent. China’s B2B break-out market leader is Alibaba, which brought in about US$1 billion in B2B eCommerce revenue in 2014, comprising roughly 34 percent of the country market. Alibaba has been busy with B2B this spring, partnering with alternative lending startups in the United Kingdom to facilitate B2B trade between the two countries, hosting a B2B eCommerce competition in Hong Kong to support Chinese SMEs, and, as of this coming Monday, launching a new cross-border service on its 1668.com platform to facilitate foreign imports for Chinese SMEs.
> Posted by Center Staff
What are the most important questions that need to be researched in the financial inclusion arena?
The Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion will soon launch a fellows program to support research and thought leadership in financial inclusion – and we are calling on you to help! The purpose of this program will be to encourage independent researchers and analysts to examine some of the most important challenges in the financial inclusion arena. We plan to select a few priority research topics for fellows to examine.
Here’s where you come in. Below is a list of research topics that members of our Financial Inclusion 2020 team believe need answering. We’re checking in with you – our blog audience – to find out which topics you think are the most important to investigate. Please consider this list a starting point. Give us thumbs up or down on the topics listed, and propose topics of your own. Once we select the top priority questions, we will issue a call for proposals. Meanwhile, we offer this list to provoke a broader conversation about research needed in the financial inclusion field.
You can respond either in the comment block below, or by email to .
Technology-related topics
- Impact of ubiquitous internet access on the business models for financial inclusion. By 2020, the vast majority of the world’s people will have access to internet through smart phones and tablets. Internet access could transform the way financial service providers and customers interact and facilitate a richer interface with customers. What scenarios are possible and are providers ready to respond?
- Under what conditions do “on-ramps” lead to deeper inclusion? With the World Bank’s commitment to Universal Financial Access focused on connecting people to transaction accounts, the next question is how (and whether) such connections lead to active account usage or access to additional products. What are the cases of successful access expansion that have led to deeper inclusion and why did they succeed?
> Posted by Ignacio Mas, Senior Research Fellow, Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, and David Porteous, CEO, Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA)
#119705259 / gettyimages.com
In a recent new paper, we look at identity from two opposite but complementary perspectives. The first is a narrow biological perspective, under which identity is associated with one´s uniqueness as an autonomous living organism with a unique genetic makeup. The legal basis for identity tends to be based on this perspective, and leads to questions that focus fundamentally on the confidence with which identities can be asserted and confirmed.
Beyond the definitional question of what it is about one´s person that creates his or her individuality, there is the empirical question of how it can be verified by someone else, such as a financial service provider, through observation. Generally your identity is established indirectly, by demonstrating your command over some proxies (e.g. a signature, a card, a PIN) that have been linked to your identity. The core decision for providers is therefore to determine when they consider that they know someone with good enough probability.
The second perspective is information-based, and views individuals as an irreducibly complex web of personal information and attributes. Digital markets tend to take this view of identity, with customers characterized more in terms of defined attributes, preferences, and transaction histories that can drive customer segmentation than on intrinsic uniqueness. This perspective leads to questions that focus fundamentally on what information about themselves it is legitimate to expect people to reveal to build up their identity, and what information they have the right to keep private.
> Posted by Leora Klapper, Lead Economist, Development Research Group, the World Bank
Eroll Asuncion runs a grocery store on the remote Philippine island of Rapu-Rapu. It’s a three-hour boat ride to the nearest bank. Fortunately, that’s no longer a problem – thanks to the mobile phone revolution and new regulations that make it easier for people to open and use an account.
Eroll’s customers now pay bills and send and receive remittances through a mobile money account they access via mobile phones. Eroll’s SuperStore has become something of a bank for islanders using these mobile accounts, allowing them to send and receive cash at the store.
“My husband sends (me) money twice a month, on the 15th and 30th,” Yolanda, a customer, explains.
Hundreds of millions of others like Yolanda are opening new accounts through their phone or at a bank or similar institution. It’s part of a financial revolution that’s sweeping the developing world. Since 2011, 245 million more people in East Asia and the Pacific have become part of the formal financial system by opening an account.
The World Bank has just released our much-anticipated second edition of the Global Findex, the world’s only comprehensive gauge of global progress on “financial inclusion”—how people save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The data give us insight into account ownership around the world, and how people are using – or not using – those accounts.
The Global Findex offers good news. As of 2014, 62 percent of adults around the world had access to a bank account. Put another way, the number of people who are “unbanked” has tumbled to 2.0 billion from 2.5 billion in 2011, when the Global Findex was first released.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, Fellow, CFI
In 2013, Elisabeth Rhyne was asked what she was particularly excited about as she looked forward to the future of financial inclusion. Her response? “A second data point.”
Well, now we have that second data point. The 2014 Global Findex reports that 62 percent of people in the world have a bank or mobile money account, up from 51 percent in 2011, and those two points describe a line. Simply projecting that line forward takes the world to about 83 percent of people with accounts by the year 2020. But of course, that’s not the whole story…
The Global Findex encouragingly articulates some concrete steps that governments and providers can take to accelerate progress toward financial access. I would venture to guess that these steps would bridge the gap between the projected 83 percent and the full 100 percent by 2020 (you can read about the World Bank’s goal of universal access by 2020 here).
So let’s just assume that universal access will be a reality by 2020. We can envision a world in the near future where people receive wages, government payments, and remittances into their bank accounts. Businesses spend less on payroll and have fewer risks than if they paid out in cash. Governments avoid corruption associated with social benefit payments by having a cheaper G2P system that entails fewer human intermediaries. Remittances are cheap—or even free—and go directly into the recipient’s bank account. Cause for celebration, right?
Well, yes, but not so fast.
Facebook
Twitter
Recent Comments