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> 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 the Microinsurance Network’s first annual “The State of Microinsurance” magazine, the findings of Child and Youth Finance International’s (CYFI) survey on youth finance regulation in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a blog post from the MasterCard Foundation on the role of microfinance associations in expanding financial inclusion. Here are a few more details:
- The Microinsurance Network magazine sheds light on global microinsurance progress, failures and innovations, approaches to regulation, assessing and meeting demand, and the role of microinsurance in disaster risk management strategies.
- The Latin America youth finance regulation survey, which CYFI aims to replicate in other regions, revealed that there is a great diversity in approaches to regulating practices affecting this client segment, and that young people are rarely seen as independent economic actors.
- In a recent blog post, the MasterCard Foundation draws on its experience working with microfinance associations in sub-Saharan Africa to discuss their myriad abilities to advance financial inclusion, including through knowledge sharing, collecting and analyzing sectoral data, and supporting collective lobbying.
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 Center Staff
How has Latin America and the Caribbean’s (LAC) market at the base of the pyramid (BoP) changed during recent years? Tuesday, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) released a new report exploring this question. Among the findings, the research revealed that the BoP market (those living on less than $10 per day) has grown 22 percent in a decade, going from $623 billion in 2000 to $759 billion in 2010. This increase wasn’t the result of demographic changes, but of economic growth. The per capita income among the BoP in the region increased at 2 percent annually across the decade, while that of the overall population remained relatively constant. What does this mean? A lot of things, including that there is a growing opportunity for companies to offer products and services to this population segment that have long been unavailable to them.
The report presents information on the size of the BoP market, its social-economic characteristics, market segments, consumer preferences, spending patterns, and demand-related factors. The report also looks at the supply side of the BoP market and analyzes the types of business models, distribution channels, and input sources that have successfully engaged this population segment.
Here are some of the report’s main findings: Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Communications Associate, CFI
GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) program recently released the report ‘Mobile Financial Services in Latin America & the Caribbean,’ spotlighting the region’s booming mobile money activity. I talked with the report’s authors, Mireya Almazán and Jennifer Frydrych, to learn more about the project. The first half of our conversation, published last week, is available here. The second half of our conversation follows.
An enabling regulatory environment, as identified in the report, is one where the regulator has taken a functional and proportional approach that allows banks and non-bank providers to compete, as well as establish different types of partnerships for the provision of mobile money services. What does this means in practical terms, and how has or hasn’t Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) met these conditions?
An open and level playing field that allows banks, mobile operators, and third parties to offer e-money is critical for mobile money to succeed. Anecdotal evidence, commercial lessons, and international regulatory principles all speak in favor of opening the market to providers with different value propositions and business models. Best practices are well established at both the regulatory and commercial level to guarantee the soundness of mobile money schemes, as well as the integrity and stability of the financial system.
As of April 2015, six of 19 (32 percent) mobile money markets in LAC have an enabling environment for mobile money, up from only two in 2012 (Nicaragua and Peru). These six include Bolivia, Brazil, Guyana, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Peru. Uruguay also has enabling regulation for mobile money and in fact issued the nation’s first e-money license to Redpago in April 2015; however, as Redpago has not formally launched, Uruguay is not categorized as a “mobile money market” in this report’s analysis.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Communications Associate, CFI
GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) program recently released the report ‘Mobile Financial Services in Latin America & the Caribbean’, spotlighting the region’s booming mobile money activity. I talked with the report’s authors, Mireya Almazán and Jennifer Frydrych, to learn more about the project. The first half of our conversation follows. The second half of the conversation will be published in the coming days.
One of the headline messages of the new report is that the mobile money market in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is the fastest growing of any region in terms of account ownership. How do the numbers look?
Collectively, the 37 mobile money services in the region account for roughly 15 million registered mobile money accounts and 6.2 million accounts that have been active within the past 90-days. Notably, LAC witnessed a 50 percent growth rate in the number of new registered mobile money accounts between December 2013 and 2014, making LAC the world’s fastest growing region in new accounts. LAC’s users are more active than the global average active customer rate (42 percent of all accounts are active, compared to 35 percent globally). Most encouragingly, there are now five deployments in LAC with over a million registered customers. Each of these deployments counts at least half a million 90-day active customers, and together they cover an extremely diverse set of markets.
The three markets that stand out in the region are Paraguay, Honduras, and El Salvador. These three markets all feature in the top 15 globally for mobile money account penetration (number of active mobile money accounts divided by total adult population).
> Posted by Center Staff
This edition of top picks features posts highlighting India’s financial inclusion progress and persisting gaps, how the deployment of digital financial systems requires strategic human capital management, and the state of the mobile money industry in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The proportion of adults in India with a bank account increased from 35 to 53 percent between 2011 and 2014, according to the recently-released Global Findex data. A new post on the IFMR LEAD blog shares the Findex findings for India, and outlines the ways in which financial inclusion in the country is still far from achieved. The post affirms that account ownership is just the first step towards inclusion, discussing account usage, gender disparity, and uptake of mobile services, among other topics.
> Posted by Center Staff
The scale of the unmet financing needs of older adults around the world – and especially in lower and middle-income countries – is so significant that if unaddressed, it won’t just be each generation as it enters the later years that pays the price. It’ll be their families, healthcare systems, governments, and societies writ large, too. In India, for example, only 12 percent of the population has any sort of pension. A rapidly growing demographic, within 25 years, the percent of the world’s population over 60 will nearly double.
Recent progress does deserve mention. Just a few days ago, on the heels of last year’s launch of the Jan Dhan Yojana national financial inclusion strategy, India’s central government unveiled three new contributory social security schemes for pensions, life insurance, and disability insurance. Our hope is that these new programs are hugely successful and prove demonstrative for other countries to follow.
> Posted by the Access to Finance Unit, Multilateral Investment Fund, Inter-American Development Bank
With fertility rates falling and life expectancy on the rise, the world’s population is aging rapidly. And though increasing longevity can be considered a triumph of development, for Latin America and the Caribbean, this rapid aging presents a serious challenge: the population is not financially prepared to support itself during old age.
According to the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB’s) book Better Pensions, Better Jobs, by the year 2050 there will be three times as many people over the age of 65 as there are today in the region. However, if trends continue, by this date only one in two seniors will have saved for a pension. This means that about 130 million workers are not saving for their pension.
In response, several countries have taken efforts towards increasing pension coverage to lower-income and vulnerable segments through non-contributory pension schemes. From 1990 to 2013, 13 countries in the region implemented programs aimed at expanding non-contributory pensions. Still, even those that receive pensions are finding their value, generally less than US$10 per day, insufficient to cover their basic needs. This means that current and future generations of seniors will have to rely on alternative sources of income to complement their pensions.
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