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> Posted by Anna Koblanck, Communications Officer, International Finance Corporation
The Sakombi neighborhood in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is not an area where traditional banks spend their marketing money. The people who live and work here are street hawkers and day laborers, low-income people in the informal economy who are generally considered risky and expensive customers by most financial institutions.
Microfinance institution FINCA thinks differently. It conducts regular sales drives in Sakombi and in similar neighborhoods across Kinshasa, offering new customers the chance to open a bank account with just a one dollar deposit. These marketing drives build on a network of agents that FINCA is rolling out with the help of mobile and biometric technology.
> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly and Ruben Marquez, CFI and Bancomer
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” – Shakespeare
While Juliet’s musings on the essence of her Romeo might be poetic, she is quite wrong. Words determine a great deal about how we think about things—and one word change could change hundreds of thousands of people’s use of financial products.
Percent of People Who Report Saving in the Past Year
In Mexico, if you were to ask those at the base of the pyramid whether they save, they would likely tell you no. CFI’s Country Profiles show the Global Findex Data in the figure at right.
When asked whether they had saved any money in the past year, roughly 14 percent of people in the bottom 40 percent of the economy in Mexico answered yes. This same group of people in all upper middle income economies (of which Mexico was a part at the time of the survey) were about twice as likely to say yes to this question.
Does this mean that the poor in Mexico just don’t prioritize savings? Probably not.
In Mexico, there is a difference between the word for “saving” (ahorrar) and the word for “keeping” (guardar). When you ask people at the base of the pyramid whether they “keep” money for the future, they are much more likely to answer yes.
The Findex survey (the source of the above data) may have inadvertently run into this problem in Mexico. The difference between two words could explain the low incidence of saving reported at the base of the pyramid compared to countries with a similar income level.
When we take this language difference into account, there are implications for institutional knowledge, financial education, and product marketing.
On this front, Bancomer in Mexico has found that there is a reorientation to be done within the bank itself—while Bancomer is listening to clients, for listening to be effective it must be listening for the right language. Within the bank, integrating the vernacular of low-income clients has led to new views on this income segment. Past market research has included the question of whether potential clients are saving—with dismal results. With the recognition that this population is saving, but just calling it something else, there is a different perception of the kinds of products that customers might be interested in.
> Posted by Karen Firestone, President and CEO, Aureus Asset Management
The following post was originally published on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.
Financial services firms want to reach more women; so I conclude from data presented by Pamela Grossman of Getty Images at SXSW this year. According to data collected by Getty, financial firms are buying 20 percent more stock photos of women today than they were five years ago. At the same time, the share of men shown in their advertising has declined.
Of course, we live in a wildly diverse world; we want to be inclusive and broad-minded ourselves; and we therefore want our providers of financial advice, energy, and technology to reflect those values. We prefer Morgan Stanley or Citigroup to be talking to all of us, showing us that they have transcended their traditional, mostly white and male clientele. According to Chris Edwards, former Group Creative Director for Arnold Worldwide, we also want visual evidence that the professionals at these firms are as diverse as the clientele they seek. Advertising images reinforce and extend these efforts.
Financial institutions portray women today as competent and self-confident, and often feature attractive, middle-aged advisers talking to couples in which the woman is similarly well dressed and clearly attentive. According to Dr. Emma Firestone, who has studied the audience perception and response to images and words in media and entertainment, from a cognitive perspective, “It makes sense for advertisers to present women as strong, well-educated consumers. This is appealing to women who see an attractive self-image reflected back at them, and to men, who are flattered by the idea that smart, self-possessed, and financially secure women are their own life partners.” Men are much more likely today, than decades ago, to be comfortable with and appreciate their spouses as full partners in their own financial decision-making – at the same time, imagery of supportive female financial advisers plays into comforting stereotypes of the woman-as-helpmeet, perhaps humanizing an industry consumers view as confusing or even threatening.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
It turns out there really is no escaping it. That old saying “it’s all about who you know” applies to the microfinance industry, too. In a paper published last month in the journal Science, researchers from MIT and Stanford University shared findings from a study on the diffusion of information and participation, specifically looking at how enrollment in new microfinance programs is influenced by the social network positions of those who are first told about the program. The study found that an MFI’s initial point-of-contact could have serious implications for a program’s enrollment.
The researchers grounded their study in modeling the diffusion of information and participation through a social network that discriminates between information passing (people must be aware of a program before they can enroll in it) and endorsement (the decisions of those who are aware of a program may be influenced by the decisions of those around them). In order to create such a model, one has to map out, in great detail with lots of data, such a social network. That’s just what the researchers did.
The team spent six months collecting information about the local residents of the study’s site: 43 villages outside of Bangalore, India. They surveyed households about a wide range of interactions – who goes to temple with whom, who asks for advice from whom, who barrows kerosene from whom, etc. – constructing a social network structure. Once this was created, representatives from the participating MFI, Bharatha Swamukti Samsthe, began entering the villages and offering microfinance loans to residents, starting by inviting village “leaders,” teachers, shopkeepers, savings group leaders, etc., to an informational meeting, and afterwards asked them to spread information about the loans.
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