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Which topics would you most want to see researched?
> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly, Director of Research, CFI
Hi there. I would love your help as we select topics for our 2018 CFI Fellows research.
CFI is getting ready to launch the request for proposals for our 2018 Fellows cohort (a lot of you have been asking when it’s coming out, and the answer is SOON!). The CFI Fellows Program is designed to respond to questions we think are critical to the future of financial inclusion. Fellows come from many perspectives, including both relatively junior and senior well-known researchers, and including researchers who have been in the financial inclusion community for a long time and some who are perceptive outsiders. We share a set of topics for study, and ask interested researchers to submit research proposals that address the topic of their interest.
Our semi-final list of questions is long, and we ask for your help refining or prioritizing them – or adding new ones. We’ve enabled comments at the bottom of this post for your feedback. Alternatively, feel free to email me at skelly@accion.org.
Here are the questions we are currently considering:
Read the rest of this entry »
How can an app help improve financial health? Spoiler alert: offering users sound financial advice isn’t enough!
CFI and the Microfinance Centre (MFC) in Warsaw are working together to build a smartphone-based tool to assist customers with gauging and improving their financial health.
As part of the project, we developed a simple financial health quiz that will serve as the foundation of the application, helping users not only assess their financial health, but also understand and decide on specific actions to improve it.
Last year MFC tested the quiz among the clients and staff of organizations partnering with its Borrow Wisely Campaign in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Our lessons learned from this testing phase are informing our next steps as we continue to design and build the application.
We released a new brief, “Toward a Financial Health Tool for Consumers” that distills the results of the tests and shares our lessons learned up to this stage in the project. Here’s a quick overview of our findings.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly and Elisabeth Rhyne, Director of Research and Managing Director, CFI
The World Bank is just days from releasing the next version of its Global Financial Inclusion Index (Findex), the authoritative data source on global progress toward financial inclusion. The dataset, which tracks financial inclusion in 150 countries, is released once every three years, and we have been waiting eagerly to see how things have changed since 2014. We are confident that the numbers will show enormous progress on the World Bank’s goal of universal access to financial accounts. But we wonder whether the news will also indicate that people are actually using those accounts and whether financial services are helping them achieve financial health, gain resilience and pursue opportunity – the ultimate goals of financial inclusion.
After we high-five the World Bank team for a job well-done, here are a few things that we will be looking for when we examine the new Findex numbers:
Athletes at the 2018 Winter Olympics face barriers to financial health
The following post was originally published on the Accion blog.
Nearly 3,000 top athletes from 92 countries are converging on PyeongChang, South Korea to ski, skate, sled, and curl their way to Olympic gold and glory. In addition to medals, some athletes will walk away with lucrative sponsorships. But others will return to part-time jobs, unemployment, modest stipends, and other financial situations that don’t make it on the front of a Wheaties box.
Unfortunately, gold, silver, and bronze don’t always translate to enough green for athletes to stay solvent. While medals often come with cash prizes — a gold medal will net a U.S. competitor $37,500 — these awards are only for a handful of individuals in each sport, and they pale in comparison to the funds needed to become a world-class contender. The prices of training, equipment, travel, healthcare, and other expenses add up for those competing at a global level. The high costs become particularly pronounced when you consider the increased likelihood of injuries, the difficulty of holding a full-time job while on a rigorous training schedule, and the fact that most sports only have a narrow window of time when athletes can compete in their prime.
Insights from a global seed-stage investor in fintech for the underserved
> Posted by Amee Parbhoo, Director of Investments, Accion Venture Lab
The following post was originally published on the Accion blog.
We’re in the middle of a fintech boom that could change the world. As a seed-stage investor in fintech for the underserved, Accion Venture Lab continues to see innovative startups increasing access to, reducing the cost of, or improving the quality of financial services for underserved individuals and small businesses around the world.
As we kick off a new year, we’re particularly excited about seven areas of startup-led innovation.
Digital neobanks
SmartMEI is a digital neobank serving small businesses in Brazil
In the last few years, we’ve seen the emergence of a number of digital neobanks. Neobanks offer a user-friendly digital interface and a platform for financial services without maintaining their own banking licenses. With a focus on user experience and digital applications, neobanks stand to offer faster and better service to the underserved. Moving forward, neobanks will need to provide both a compelling product for a targeted customer segment and a suite of offerings that go beyond basic accounts or credit cards to retain customers and improve unit economics. Innovators in this space include NOW Money, which offers migrant workers in the UAE a platform to more efficiently transfer remittances and access to other products and services over time, and SmartMEI, which offers small businesses in Brazil a free tax tool and access to a broader set of financial services.
> Posted by Center Staff
2017 was certainly an eventful year. And our year at CFI was no exception. Through our CFI Fellows Program and partnership with the Institute of International Finance, Mainstreaming Financial Inclusion, we produced thought-provoking research on fintech partnerships, the role of human touch in a digital age, breakthroughs in insurance and more. In the client protection area, 24 financial institutions were Smart Certified, bringing the total number of certified institutions to 94. The Africa Board Fellowship Program continued to make a difference at the governance level of financial institutions across Africa, and now roughly 200 CEOs and board members have participated in the program. And more…
Before we celebrate the New Year, we wanted to pause and look back at some of our favorite moments of 2017.
Financial Health as a Global Framework
We developed a new model for assessing financial health. The financial health framework was developed through a project led by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) with CFI and Dalberg as partners. The framework offers a globally applicable model for financial health that includes six indicators of financial health and four contributing factors that are particularly relevant to the developing world.
> Posted by Emma Morse, Project Specialist, CFI
Embed from Getty ImagesMavis Wanczyk, a staff member at Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts and a mother of two, recently became a multi-millionaire, revealing herself as the $758.7 million Powerball jackpot winner – the largest individual winner ever. Wanczyk quit her job of 32 years less than 24 hours later.
Reflecting on her decision, Wanczyk remarks, “I was just there to buy it, for just luck. Just go in, buy a scratch ticket, and say maybe it’s me, maybe it won’t be me. It’s just a chance, a chance I had to take.”
The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in over 292 million. In order to purchase all of the possible combinations, an individual would need to spend $584,402,676 on tickets. You are about 100,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning at some point in your lifetime than you are to hit this particular jackpot.
So why do Americans spend $70.15 billion on lottery tickets annually, while very few of us live in fear of being struck by lightning? Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
Client of Akiba Bank in Tanzania
Around the world today, financial service providers, technology entrepreneurs and policy makers are engaged in building a financial system that reaches out to previously excluded people, such as lower income people, very small businesses, rural dwellers, and women. Although this work is carried out in the name of the consumer, all too often, scant attention is paid to the real needs and desires consumers and very small enterprise owners have.
With that in mind, here is a thought experiment. A thought experiment is an “exercise of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.” The question for this experiment is this:
Imagine that consumers were the creators of the inclusive finance system. What would such a system look like?
What characteristics would emerge if the needs, desires and preferences of the target customers of financial inclusion were the driving force to shape their services? The observations here are drawn from consumer research conducted or commissioned by the Center for Financial Inclusion, including research in Peru, Pakistan, Georgia and Benin for the Client Voice project of the Smart Campaign, in Kenya and India for our project on financial health, in India and Mexico for our study of financial capability, and again in Kenya and India for two CFI Fellows’ projects on the role of human touch in the digital age. I offer ten propositions based on this research.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
At CFI we often talk about financial health as if it is a crisp, free-standing concept. Moreover, by connecting financial health to financial inclusion we imply – and hope – that we can affect financial health by offering the right kind of financial services and/or developing a person’s financial capabilities. However, while there is truth to this view, it is sometimes easy to overestimate the power of financial services. We need to think about how both financial and economic factors intertwine to create outcomes. If we compartmentalize financial actions, we ignore the very powerful economic factors that influence financial health.
As defined by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) – and embraced by us at CFI – three elements must all be present to declare a person, family or microenterprise to be financially healthy:
- Balanced day-to-day money management – outflows balanced with incomes over time.
- Protection from shocks – ability to draw down, borrow or call upon resources to lessen the blow when bad things happen.
- Pursuit of goals – ability to accumulate resources for medium to long-term purposes, whether personal or productive.
In speaking with low income people around the world, we find that many people intuitively define financial health in these terms, and nearly everyone tries to pursue financial health in their own lives. But achieving these three elements is not just a financial task. It requires both economic and financial actions. (It also hinges on personal choices and capabilities, but we will set these aside for now.)
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Specialist, CFI
Embed from Getty ImagesIf you’re based in the United States, you’ve likely heard about how student loan debt is problematic and has been for years. The growing volume of student debt that has become more and more the norm is so high, its effects can be overwhelming. But how bad is it? Is it just a matter of students needing to hunker down (a little longer) and pay their dues (a little more)?
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