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> Posted by David Porteous, Managing Director, Bankable Frontier Associates

In Beth Rhyne’s recent blog post (“Base-of-the-Pyramid Savings Among Accion Partners: Some News Is Bad and Some News Is Good”), she argues for the need to stratify deposits by size to understand what is happening inside a bank’s portfolio of depositors. We agree. We have just completed the four year GAFIS project, sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Associates and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Through GAFIS, we worked with five large commercial banks around the world (shown in the map below) to promote the development of appropriate savings products directed at low income people.

These five banks, which typically rank as largest or second largest retail banks in their domestic markets, collectively report 77 million customers. They too suffer from high rates of dormancy, ranging from 20 to 90 percent in different account categories. Yet they were willing to embark on a peer journey of learning and support to seek to overcome the channel and product issues which had limited the success of their savings products. And they were willing at the end to disclose in the public report, available here, some indications of the underlying stratification of their deposit. The chart below, extracted from the GAFIS report, compared median with average balances in the account categories which GAFIS supported, underlining the message in Beth Rhyne’s blog about the need to stratify savings. Read the rest of this entry »