A few days ago news broke that Facebook, the social media giant with over a billion users worldwide, is making preparations to begin offering international money transfer services. Although the development has been dismissed by Facebook as rumor, the prospect of this enormous network enabled for money transfer and the huge global need for this service makes this a story worth following.

The news, initially shared by the Financial Times and sourced from individuals involved in the proceedings, indicates that Facebook is weeks away from securing regulatory approval from Ireland’s central bank to allow its users to store money on the site and use it to pay others. Facebook’s headquarters for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is in Dublin. If approved, Facebook would be permitted to issue units of stored monetary value represented as “claims” against the company. Regulation in this area pertaining to Europe would allow approval in Ireland to green light services throughout the entire continent. The Financial Times also mentions that Facebook has had discussions about potential partnerships with several start-ups that offer international money transfer services through both smartphone and online platforms.

Facebook’s reach is massive, 1.23 billion at the end of last year, and it’s becoming increasingly diverse. Last week, thanks to increases in internet access and mobile penetration, the company achieved a milestone in India: 100 million users. Some analysts say by the end of this year India will surpass the United States (with 180 million) as the country with the most Facebook users. The social media site is big elsewhere in Asia, too. It is the most popular social network service in all but six of the region’s countries. After the US and India, Facebook’s largest countries by-users include Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines. Facebook has a large presence in Africa, as well, with 13 million users in Egypt, 9.4 million in South Africa, 5.3 million in Nigeria, 1.8 million in Kenya, and 1.4 million in Ghana.

Like Facebook, remittances volumes are increasing on the whole around the world. In a new brief on remittances and migration released last week by the World Bank, it’s shown that remittances to developing countries reached about $404 billion in 2013, an increase of 3.5 percent over 2012. Annual growth is expected to increase to an annual average of 8.4 percent over the next three years. In 2013, India received the most international remittances with $70 billion, followed by China with $60 billion, and the Philippines with $25 billion.

The world of remittances, once dominated by cash-to-cash money transfers, is increasingly going digital, through mobile money and online services. For example, long-time industry player Western Union experienced a 41 percent increase in online transactions in 2012. Along with such familiar market entities, mobile network operators, start-ups, and established internet companies (like Facebook) are entering the field. As we mentioned in a blog post earlier this week on M-Pesa expanding to Romania, M-Pesa offers international remittances, as do other mobile money outfits. Last week, in an encouraging act of cooperation, two mobile network operators announced a partnership enabling remittances between customers of the two services, which bridges a frequently-traveled remittance channel between the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. WorldRemit, an online-based start-up that allows money to be sent to the recipient’s phone, bank account, or designated pickup location, recently completed one of the largest Series A funding rounds (first round of early-stage funding) of any European financial technology business.

Whether or not Facebook decides to join these groups, the expansion of the market for sending remittances is good news for clients. In many countries, the total volume of remittances is greater than the total volume of exports. And the influx of additional players in the market is conducive to competition and lower prices. What’s more, electronic services are naturally more efficient, for both the provider and the client, than the brick-and-mortar-based equivalents. According to the World Bank, the average total cost of sending remittances fell in the first quarter of this year, decreasing below 8.4 percent, compared to its rate of about 9.0 percent last year. The average cost of remittances in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains an elevated 12 percent. In SSA, where mobile penetration is higher than banking penetration, mobile-based remittances are a clear opportunity.

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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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Google Trends is a public web facility which shows how often particular search terms are entered in Google relative to the total search volume, globally or for individual countries, and for defined time periods (after 2004). This gives us a good perspective into how people are approaching our industry. I looked up some of the most prominent financial inclusion terms, and found some very interesting things.

Industry rebranding. The first graph below shows that the search term “microfinance” has been much more popular than “microcredit” over the last eight years. (In each graph, all data points are scaled relative to the highest value on that graph – see methodological note at the end of this post.) “Microcredit” surged in late 2006 with the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus. Since then, searches on “microcredit” have been decreasing in relative terms and, by contrast, the new term “financial inclusion” has been gaining ground and is now comparable in its use as a search term to “microcredit.” Still, despite strong attempts from many quarters to rebrand around the financial inclusion label, it has not yet taken off.

Massive impact of the AP crisis. The graph also shows a cliff-like drop on “microfinance” searches after October 2010, which coincides with the break-out of the microcredit crisis in Andhra Pradesh. It seems that the entire sector has suffered a massive loss of interest from the global internet public since then. I suspect that few within the industry have understood the magnitude of the fall-off in the court of general public interest.

Microinsurance is gaining ground. The next graph compares the occurrence of the three main types of microfinancial services, since 2008. Microinsurance has maintained its share of search, and is gaining ground on microcredit. Microsavings remains a negligible search term. This may be because there is thought to be much scope for product specificity around credit and insurance services for the poor, whereas savings services are less differentiated by size (an account is an account).

Enduring interest in informal savings groups. In the graph below, microfinance is compared to two informal financial mechanisms: Self-Help Groups (SHG) and Savings and Loans Groups (SLG). It shows that prior to 2009, “SHG” was as frequent a search term as microfinance itself, but interest in SHGs has dropped steadily. Meanwhile, “SLG” has maintained a steadier, though perhaps cyclical, presence in Google searches. The term “village bank” or “village banking” is searched much less frequently. (Note that these search terms are less clean because the acronyms mean many other things as well – do a Google search on them to check on that. In each case, we have included the acronym and the full name, with and without hyphens, and in singular and plural. In the case of SLGs we have added the corresponding terms around Village Savings and Loan Associations.)

Branchless banking is for specialists. Turning now to technology-based models, the search terms “branchless banking,” “banking beyond branches,” and “agent banking” appear to be neologisms that started being used around 2008. The frequency of these searches since suggests a growing industry, though they barely register if compared to “microfinance.” The notion of “cash lite” (in its range of possible spellings), a frequent objective of branchless banking enthusiasts, seems to come and go in global Google searching, and if anything it has waned. (“Cashless” is much more common, but that is probably driven by interest in and by developed countries.)

The allure of mobile and M-PESA. The following graph looks at the occurrence of mobile financial services on Google searches. “Mobile money” picks up dramatically from May 2011, coinciding with the launch of Google Wallet, which marked the beginning of the mobile wallet wars started in the U.S. M-PESA search volumes have climbed steadily, and we can observe a four-fold increase in search activity in the last three months. This is a puzzle: what can drive this sudden burst of interest in M-PESA? It might have been spurred by the launch of M-Shwari (see my commentary on that here), but the announcement was in late November whereas activity picked up from October.

Growing interest in individual players rather than industry bodies. The final graph below shows that the prevalence of “CGAP” (and its full-name version) in search terms has been dropping steadily. (Remember that this is a drop in relative search term occurrence, and likely not a drop in actual search volume.) The same pattern can be observed for “Microcredit Summit.” This is probably a sign of a maturing industry: people’s search terms become more concrete as they become more aware of individual issues and players. See for instance how the trend has been the opposite for “Compartamos” (by itself, preceded or followed by the word “Banco”). Compartamos Banco’s IPO occurred in April 2007, and that marked a turning point in search-volume. In this case it is probably capital market interest in the specific stock that is driving interest.

Explanatory Note: Google Trends expresses results graphically in charts normalized so that the highest value in a particular chart gets a score of 100, and all other datapoints on that chart are rescaled relative to that. A downward trend represents a fall in the share of a search term relative to all searches conducted that month, not necessarily an absolute reduction in the number of searches requested on that term. To the extent that search terms are entered in English (which I did), there is of course a bias towards what the English-speaking world is searching for. This data is probably overwhelmingly dominated by the interests of the developed world, since that’s where a disproportionate proportion of searches come from. This can only be meaningfully used for search terms with a fairly unique meaning, otherwise the data would pick up a variety of search intent. One can judge how unique a term is by doing a Google search on it and seeing how many different types of results come up.

Ignacio Mas is an independent consultant. You can learn more about his work here.

Image Credit: findingDulcinea

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“Can we make savings a little more interesting for people, please?”

Google just launched an initiative called Project 10^100. Out of 154,000 user submitted ideas to make the world a better place, Google narrowed down the list to 16 major ideas and you can vote for one of them!

I would like to call your attention to one idea in general, it is to “Build better banking tools for everyone”