Tag Archive

> Posted by Susy Cheston

This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.

The television comedy survived only a few months in the sixties, but it had a catchy theme song: “It’s about time, it’s about space, about two men in the strangest place.” In the show, a couple of astronauts travelled at the speed of light and accidentally went back in time instead of space. Talk about disruptive technology! The two men ended up in prehistoric times trying to make sense of life with a cave community, with predictably inane results.

The theme song came to me as I was thinking about the ways both technology and new approaches to product design are blurring the lines between time and space. It’s a neat concept to say that financial services move resources across time (credit and savings) or across space (payments). But just as those astronauts thought they were traveling in space and ended up traveling in time, technology is disrupting financial services, stripping financial services down to their basic elements and allowing those elements to be re-combined in new ways. The quartet of products we can rattle off in our sleep—credit, savings, insurance, payments—no longer have sharp boundaries as technology gives us new ways to store value and as financial services enter new markets. Susan Johnson’s recent research in Kenya showed that we sometimes don’t even know what we’re talking about when we use the words savings and payments. In Kenya, a so-called savings account turned out to serve as merely a payment device for payroll transfers.  And she points out the ways experts are grappling with language as financial services encounter mobile phones, e.g. “savings” defined as “keeping money in the phone for at least 24 hours.” (Hey, I can save lots of money by that definition!) Read the rest of this entry »