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CFI and HelpAge’s New Research Initiative Examines the Financial Needs of Older Persons
> Posted by Eric Zuehlke, Web and Communications Director, CFI
Proportion of the Population that is Elderly (click to enlarge)
A few years ago, my 90-year-old grandfather moved from Japan, where he had lived his entire life, to live with my parents in Virginia. Although he was retired and living comfortably, the death of my grandmother left him without an adequate support system. With his healthy pension and public assistance from the Japanese government, mixed with the security of living with my parents, he is well cared for. I’d say he is financially included. But on a global scale, he’s one of the lucky ones. All his supports – close family, a pension, good health care, and insurance – are inadequate for many. And the need for appropriate services is growing.
The facts speak for themselves. Between 2010-2020, the population of older persons will almost double in middle-income countries and increase by 40 percent worldwide. Yet despite this growing population, the provision of financial services is woefully inadequate. One in four older people in low and middle-income countries do not have a pension, and most pensions are inadequate to meet individual needs. Not only are financial services lacking, we don’t even fully understand financial inclusion in older age. The mismatch between the scale of the need and the attention devoted to it is staggering.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
The following post was originally published on Next Billion.
The Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum, in October 2013, was an opportunity for hundreds of leaders to come together and dedicate themselves to quality financial access for all, while at the same time proclaiming that global access is, in fact, within the realm of the possible. The Forum itself generated many action ideas, forged new relationships between actors and created a surge in momentum.
Since October, we at the Center for Financial Inclusion have been in a (very welcome) quiet phase, during which we are laying the groundwork for the next big push. Over the past few months we have been busy following up on some of the most fascinating insights that came out of the FI2020 process. I’d like to mention a few here – and describe how these insights can make a difference in the quest for global financial inclusion by 2020.
Aging and Financial Inclusion
One of the biggest “Aha!” insights for us came from our Mapping the Invisible Market work, which revealed the rapid growth of older population segments, especially among middle-income countries. In these countries, including much of Latin America and Asia, the over-65 age cohort will rise within a decade or two from about 5 percent of the population to about 15 percent, putting great stress on traditional systems for supporting later life.
We are sure that such changes will have big implications for financial inclusion, and so we decided to team up with HelpAge International, one of the premier global organizations dedicated to aging. When we contacted HelpAge, it had just released its “Global Age Watch Index, 2013,” a ranking of countries on the basis of quality of life for older people. HelpAge has done important analysis on income strategies actually used by people as they age, and it knows that these strategies are more diverse and creative than stereotypes might suggest. CFI and HelpAge will work together to dig deeper into the financial services needs related to aging and preparation for later life. We will also look at the financial barriers older clients face, whether these are physical limitations (related to acquired disabilities), policies (such as arbitrary age cut-offs), or susceptibility to fraud and abuse. We will focus this research in Latin America. We are convinced that the life-course lens on financial inclusion will reveal a wide range of opportunities to advance inclusion. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Nora Dowd Eisenhower and Naomi Karp, Assistant Director of the Office for Older Americans and Policy Advisor, CFPB
The following post was originally published on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Blog.
An older Oklahoma resident began receiving sweepstakes offers in the mail after her 90-year-old husband moved into a nursing home. Just send $50, $100, $2000, even $5000 to claim your prize, they promised. When she asked a bank employee to help her send a large amount of cash in the mail, the bank investigated. It turned out the older customer had been writing as many as 90 checks a month to collect promised prizes that never materialized. The bank contacted the Postal Inspection Service to investigate and the authorities intervened.
A 98-year-old lawyer was scammed by a purported friend who loaned him office space and then accessed financial records stored there. When the older man was hospitalized for hip surgery, the 76-year-old friend drained $330,000 from bank accounts and used the money to pay for a trip to Puerto Rico and purchases at a variety of stores. Ultimately, the victim’s banks alerted authorities because of concerns about unusual activity on the accounts.
As we travel the country, we hear more stories of banks, credit unions, money transmitters, and other financial services providers spotting financial abuse targeted at older adults. Some of these are success stories like the ones we just shared: the financial institution makes a timely report, and authorities can prevent the theft, prosecute the perpetrator, and help the victim.
But sometimes financial institution personnel are confused. They want to help protect the consumer, but are unsure whether privacy laws allow them to share a consumer’s personal information with law enforcement and other authorities that can take action.
> Posted by Center Staff
The U.N.’s Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict) is conducting a survey for financial services providers on the practices of their institutions in implementing services that are accessible for older persons and persons with disabilities (PWDs).
Older persons are the fastest growing age group globally. In 1950, 1 in 20 people worldwide was elderly. By 2050 it will be 1 in 5. PWDs are among the largest of vulnerable groups in the world. It’s estimated that about 15 percent of the global population has some sort of disability. To achieve full inclusion, it’s essential that financial services providers offer products and services that are accessible to these client segments.
The survey targets current practices of respondents’ organizations, as well as future services plans for these two client groups. Collected information will contribute to G3ict’s larger effort to design and share resources on service options for banks to effectively serve these underbanked groups.
> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly, Fellow, CFI
The Financial Inclusion 2020 project at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
As people age, their use of financial services changes. We explored this in detail when we published a lifecycle approach to financial services in Peter Kasprowicz and Elisabeth Rhyne’s Looking Through the Demographic Window. People of working age need to plan for the future while also providing for their families in the present. People who are elderly need to be able to draw on their savings, manage their wealth, and in many cases, draw on and use their pensions.
When we look at the world as a whole, we see little difference between bank account ownership among the working age population (defined as ages 25 to 64) and those who are older (age 65+):
Source: World Bank Global Findex Microdata, 2012
This global equality between the two age groups masks interesting variation in regions in account ownership by age. In Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia and the Pacific, a much higher percentage of working age adults than older adults have accounts, while Latin America and the Caribbean shows little difference between those groups. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Meghan Greene and Sonja E. Kelly, Manager and Fellow, CFI
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
What’s in a number? Part of the Center’s Financial Inclusion 2020 work is to think about how global trends affect financial inclusion demand—we’ve been doing so in our Mapping the Invisible Market work and in our exploration of the client perspective.
In this work, it can be useful to think in terms of age. In our demographic work we examined how a person’s stage in life might affect his or her demand for financial services. We also discovered that many developing countries have rapidly aging populations. But just how rapidly the populations are aging depends on the definition of old. When calculating dependency ratios (the ratio of those who are dependent to those who are in the working age population), the UN recommends the following definitions:
- “Child” is a person under the age of 15
- “Youth” is a person aged 15-24
- “Old age” is age 65 and above Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Marcella Corsi and Annika Cayrol, EMN Research Working Group
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”
We are increasingly aware of the aging global population thanks to the findings from the Center’s Mapping the Invisible Market project, and yet we have been hard-pressed to find many people looking at the changing needs for financial services as people age. We were therefore delighted to learn that the Research Working Group of the European Microfinance Network (EMN) conducted a debate on “Microfinance as a Tool of Active Aging“ and are pleased to have Marcella Corsi and Annika Cayrol share some of their examples.
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