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> Posted by Mark Pickens, Senior Director, Visa
The future doesn’t come with an owner’s manual saying how to set up, operate, or troubleshoot it. When we launched mVisa in Rwanda in 2013, it was the first interoperable mobile phone-based payment ecosystem in any emerging market. We didn’t know what was possible. But we knew what we were aiming at. We wanted to make mobile money work better.
Nearly all mobile money schemes are “closed loops”. They do not permit funds to be shared with users of any other scheme. Since consumers cannot transact with everyone they want or spend everywhere they go, they see mobile accounts as less useful than cash. Fewer make the switch from cash, the net financial inclusion impact is stunted, and commercial returns are blunted. The idea of mVisa is to connect the closed loops by routing mobile money transactions via VisaNet, the global software and data centers that process transactions by more than 2 billion account holders and sustain more than 30 million points of access in the Visa network.
We chose Rwanda to pilot the mVisa concept. A smaller market makes it easier to know and be known by key stakeholders. That is an important consideration when starting a multiparty ecosystem that requires all players to move in a similar direction in a similar timeframe. Rwanda fit the bill well.
> Posted by Center Staff
The latest edition of the Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed, our weekly online magazine sharing the big news in banking the unbanked, is now available. Among the stories in this week’s edition are a new publication from GSMA that outlines operational guidelines for mobile money providers offering interoperable services, the Bank of Ghana issuing logos to licensed microfinance institutions so that they’re discernible from unlicensed ones, and, in the United States, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) working with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to target incidences of redlining (the practice of lenders charging minorities more for products or excluding them from services altogether). Here are a few more details:
- Account-to-account mobile money interoperability can bring significant benefits to providers and customers if conducted correctly, but weak implementation can bring a slew of negative ramifications; the new GSMA report highlights key requirements for effective interoperability and actions for providers to realize them.
- To combat unlicensed microfinance institutions frauding clients in Ghana, the government revealed a new system of logos to be issued to licensed MFIs, helping clients know which institutions they can and can’t trust.
- At a recent conference, officials from HUD and CFPB, citing recent cases of redlining, announced they had signed a memorandum of understanding to work together in sharing information and investigating mortgage lending discrimination.
For more information on these and other stories, read the latest issue of the FI2020 News Feed here, and make sure to subscribe to the weekly online magazine 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 Eric Zuehlke at .
> Posted by Rishabh Khosla, Senior Investment Analyst, Accion Venture Lab
The following post was originally published on SocialStory.
The Indian financial services landscape is undergoing a tectonic shift. The last few years have seen a renewed public focus on expanding financial inclusion. Building off prior programs, the government has invested in regulatory reform, improvements to the banking system, payments, and ID infrastructure. They have also announced a series of programs targeting the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) and micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Simultaneously, we are beginning to see real shifts in the adoption of digital technologies and banking services (such as basic savings accounts and smartphones), driven by compelling use-cases, such as government subsidies, delivered directly into bank accounts, and rickshaw-hailing apps that use mobile wallets. Together these trends are unleashing tremendous innovation with the potential to speed financial inclusion for millions.
As investors in early and growth stage “social” enterprises that are speeding financial inclusion around the world, we believe startups are uniquely positioned to navigate this shifting technological, regulatory, and competitive environment. Indeed, financial sector reform in India has had many false starts, and there are still many regulatory and structural hurdles to be overcome. However, we believe India is nearing an inflection point with changes playing out in three areas that are giving birth to exciting startup financial services models: MSME finance, digital payments, and consumer services.
> Posted by Monica Brand Engel and Jackson Scher, Managing Director and Program Coordinator, Frontier Investments Group, Accion
Innovative payment solutions are proliferating globally. Enabled by the exponential expansion of mobile phones, social media, “big data”, and internet access, financial players throughout the world are inventing new ways to complete transactions. Disruptive innovations such as prepaid options, NFC-enabled payments, and cryptocurrencies are gaining significant adoption and are changing the payments space. These trends are especially pronounced in emerging markets where many new entrants have chosen to “leapfrog” traditional, resource-intensive systems and dive directly into the seamless and nimble world of digital financial services. Although these exciting innovations in digital payments have the potential to increase convenience for customers and dramatically reduce costs, some challenges remain. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
What are the most important unanswered questions in financial inclusion?
Last week I was fortunate to participate in the small, idea-packed Conference on Financial Inclusion at Harvard Business School, organized by Professor Rajiv Lal. The attendees were a high-level microcosm of the financial inclusion world, a sort of mini-Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum. A prime purpose of the gathering was to identify a potential research agenda.
Among the ideas emerging from very rich conversations, I identified three distinct areas of research: business questions that could be addressed through HBS’s famous case method; research focused on regulation; and social science research focused on consumers. Because what one says at HBS stays at HBS, I cannot identify who offered what idea, but here is a brief summary.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
The CFI’s Financial Inclusion 2020 project team has been talking to the experts lately to get their views on the main recommendations that came out of our 2013 Roadmap to Inclusion process.
One of the high level recommendations was as follows:
Regulators need to craft regulation that allows technology-enabled business models to emerge, while balancing access and protection for base of the pyramid consumers.
We asked some of the experts to give their views on whether this recommendation is moving forward across the developing world. The general response was, “Not fast enough,” and so we probed to find out more about what is getting in the way.
Many of the players in financial inclusion envision a rich technology-enabled ecosystem in which customers can affordably use electronic means to make payments (inter-operably, of course) and to access savings, credit, and other financial services. In this vision, providers sometimes compete and sometimes partner to offer various services. Financial institutions, telecommunication companies, payment providers, governments, and others find themselves part of a complex network that seamlessly enables consumers to manage and enhance their financial lives.
> Posted by Juan Blanco, Associate, Financial Inclusion 2020, CFI
Mobile money services have spread like wildfire, making people less cash-reliant and able to easily carry out transactions like bill payments and money transfers. GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked program identified 14 mobile money sprinters – leaders of some of the fastest growing mobile deployments in the world. Among these, three case studies from mobile money services in Pakistan, Somaliland, and Zimbabwe have been published. The case studies highlight the reasons why these particular schemes have achieved significant customer bases and transactions volumes since their deployments.
Easypaisa (Pakistan). After only 11 months, Easypaisa registered 5 million transactions and by the end of 2012 it had 100 million transactions with a volume of $US 1.4 billion. Easypaisa was created in late 2009 by the MNO Telenor Pakistan and Tameer Bank, after Telenor acquired a 51 percent stake in Tameer. Telenor acknowledged that launching a mobile wallet product wouldn’t be the ideal way to set up Easypaisa since they only had a 22 percent market share and so the product wouldn’t encompass 40 million non-Telenor customers. Furthermore, regulations in the country called for very comprehensive Know-Your-Customer (KYC) procedures, creating the additional obstacles of increased registration cost and time.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
Rwanda has a lot to celebrate in terms of financial inclusion these days. Last week in Kigali the National Bank of Rwanda (NBR) hosted a conference in partnership with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) commemorating their 50-year anniversary. At the event, titled Financial Inclusion for Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development, NBR Governor John Rwangombwa highlighted the country’s recent rise in access levels, from 48 to 72 percent between 2008 and 2012 across formal and informal providers. Rwanda now has the laudable goal of increasing this figure to 90 percent by 2020. To help it get there, on Friday the World Bank launched a $2.25 million program supporting key financial inclusion areas for the country.
Along with overall exclusion rates dropping from 52 to 28 percent over 2008 to 2012, formal services access increased from 21 to 42 percent during the same period, according to the 2012 FinScope Rwanda Survey. The new government goal of 90 percent access by 2020 is an extension of the country’s Maya Declaration Commitment of 80 percent access by 2017. Rwanda’s growth in formal access can be attributed to products offered by both banks and non-bank providers, like the country’s community savings and credit cooperatives known as Umurenge SACCOs. Over the past three years, Umurenge SACCOs have attracted over 1.6 million customers. Ninety percent of Rwandans live within a 5 km radius of one of the cooperatives. Countrywide, the number of MFIs, including Umurenge SACCOs, increased from 125 to 491 between 2008 and December 2013. Elsewhere in the sector, over the last three years, the number of banks increased from 10 to 14, the number of insurance companies increased from 9 to 13, and the number of pension providers increased from 41 to 56.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
Over 16 million mobile money customers in Tanzania are now connected to one another thanks to an interoperability agreement announced Wednesday between mobile network operators (MNOs) Tigo, Airtel, and Zantel. An important act of market cooperation on the continent, the inability (or high cost) for mobile money users to send money to those of different providers has caused industry-wide fragmenting, impeding the utility and uptake of mobile banking services.
The newly connected services make up three of Tanzania’s four leading MNOs, and their mobile money products – Tigo Pesa, Airtel Money, and EzyPesa – are three of the country’s four mobile banking options.
The fourth player in the market is Vodacom with its M-Pesa service, the sibling service to the runaway success of the same name in Kenya. Included in the press release announcing the agreement was an expression of support from the three MNOs for a recent statement made by Vodacom in favor of interoperability, with mention that an interoperability linkage to Vodacom would be welcomed.
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