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> Posted by Center Staff
Financial inclusion efforts often emerge in places you wouldn’t expect. For this edition of Top Picks, we spotlight a few of these unsuspecting areas – financial services to support farmer migration, early stage impact investing – and share research on one of the inclusion community’s hottest topics: mobile money.
- Subsistence farmers in regions with long off-seasons face an essential question: Do you stay put and stretch incomes to withstand unproductive periods, or do you migrate during off-seasons to find temporary labor? A new post on the Financial Access Initiative (FAI) Blog highlights recent research from the Centre for Economic Policy Research on the potential for financial services to help farmers overcome the risks associated with migrating and attain supplemented incomes. The researchers found that offering a conditional cash or credit incentive for farmers to migrate nearly doubled their likelihood of migration, and that a large portion of these migraters continued doing so after the incentive was removed. Many of the surveyed reported forming relationships with their temporary employers and returning to work for them in subsequent off-seasons.
- The perception that there is a lack of investable opportunities is hampering the growth of the impact investing industry, according to Paul Breloff in a new Next Billion post. Managing Director of Accion Venture Lab, Breloff brings attention to recent reports from JP Morgan and Village Capital revealing this sentiment, and shares the investing approach of Venture Lab, which has yielded a strong pipeline of investable companies. Venture Lab’s three-prong strategy is invest earlier, tolerate more uncertainty, and concentrate on big-picture priorities over returns. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Paul Breloff, Managing Director, Accion Venture Lab
The following post was originally published on the CGAP Blog.
In my last post, we talked about the potential for start-ups to shake things up in the financial inclusion space. But where’s the real opportunity today? At Venture Lab, we’ve got our eye on a number of trends for 2013.
First, mobile. There’s no denying the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones – over 4 billion in the developing world and counting – and we’re excited to explore the ways that mobile phones provide a channel to reach people with financial services. Our financial inclusion community has long focused on the growth of Kenya’s M-PESA, and no doubt, with over 16 million customers and 80 percent of the nation’s population having used it last year, it’s an iconic story in a sector thirsty for scaled success stories. Hopefully, markets like Pakistan, Tanzania, and Mexico won’t be far behind.
But there are other ways mobile can enable more widespread access to financial services. Take Coda Payments, for example, one of our first investments working in Southeast Asia. Coda operates a payments processing platform that connects with mobile network operators’ (MNO) billing systems and enables customers to purchase digital goods with a straightforward deduction against prepaid airtime. Think apps, e-content, information services, insurance premiums, and more.
> Posted by Center Staff
During this holiday season we here at the Center have enjoyed finding festive greetings in our inboxes and, to a lesser extent, our mailboxes. Though amongst the lot, there was one message that stood out so much we felt compelled to share it.
Demyst.Data – a startup that aggregates and analyses “big data” to help financial institutions extend credit to underserved customers – emailed the below ode to one of our team members. Accion is an investor in Demyst through its new initiative, Venture Lab. In speaking about Demyst, Venture Lab Managing Director Paul Breloff recently said, “Demyst is a breakthrough technology that can help financial institutions around the world, including microfinance institutions, more efficiently and responsibly reach neglected customer segments with credit and other financial services.”
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