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> Posted by ideas42
The following post was originally published on the ideas42 blog.
For many of us, saving enough for retirement remains a murky, unrealized goal. Behavioral science has already proven useful in some ways, but there are still many opportunities to apply a behavioral lens to better preparing for the future.
In Mexico, not putting aside enough for retirement is a persistent problem for many people. As a result, 27 percent of the nation’s elderly live in poverty. While recent reforms to the retirement system have provided more Mexicans with individual retirement accounts than ever before, mandatory contribution rates remain too low to provide for post-retirement living expenses. To cover the rest, the system currently allows people to make voluntary contributions to their individual accounts. The problem is that they don’t: currently, less than 1 percent of the 50 million account holders make at least one contribution each year.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, Fellow, CFI
#94881934 / gettyimages.com
Thanks to a little coordination and a lot of creativity, you can now contribute to your pension in Mexico when you buy potato chips or top-up your mobile phone. Last year, to increase voluntary savings in Mexico’s pension system, the pension regulator teamed up with 7/11 retail stores and Telecomm to create channels for people to contribute to pensions, whether they receive an income within the formal labor market or not. The system added about 3,600 new contribution locations for the 53 million people in Mexico who have a public pension.
Imagine walking into your local convenience store to buy a pack of gum (or chips, or beer, or a newspaper) and deciding to contribute as little as $3 to your pension, just like you would top-up your mobile phone or buy a lottery ticket. You would give the cashier your citizen ID number (twice, just to make sure), and the cashier would give you a receipt for the transaction. The funds would travel to a centralized switch which holds the national database called Procesar and then be directed to one of 11 pension fund administrators. The funds would enjoy a 10 percent return over three years—a higher rate than savings accounts in Mexico offer—enabling them to double within 20 years.
> 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.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, Fellow, CFI
In 2013, Elisabeth Rhyne was asked what she was particularly excited about as she looked forward to the future of financial inclusion. Her response? “A second data point.”
Well, now we have that second data point. The 2014 Global Findex reports that 62 percent of people in the world have a bank or mobile money account, up from 51 percent in 2011, and those two points describe a line. Simply projecting that line forward takes the world to about 83 percent of people with accounts by the year 2020. But of course, that’s not the whole story…
The Global Findex encouragingly articulates some concrete steps that governments and providers can take to accelerate progress toward financial access. I would venture to guess that these steps would bridge the gap between the projected 83 percent and the full 100 percent by 2020 (you can read about the World Bank’s goal of universal access by 2020 here).
So let’s just assume that universal access will be a reality by 2020. We can envision a world in the near future where people receive wages, government payments, and remittances into their bank accounts. Businesses spend less on payroll and have fewer risks than if they paid out in cash. Governments avoid corruption associated with social benefit payments by having a cheaper G2P system that entails fewer human intermediaries. Remittances are cheap—or even free—and go directly into the recipient’s bank account. Cause for celebration, right?
Well, yes, but not so fast.
> Posted by Center Staff
Last week Aging and Financial Inclusion: An Opportunity was released, a new FI2020 report from CFI and HelpAge International supported by MetLife Foundation. The report examines the unmet financing needs of older adults, an area of increasing importance as global demographic shifts see the rapid expansion of this population segment. Within 25 years, the percent of the world’s population over age 60 will nearly double.
As part of the report’s launch, HelpAge International’s Head of Policy Eppu Mikkonen-Jeanneret, MetLife Foundation’s Financial Inclusion Lead Evelyn Stark, and CFI’s Managing Director Elisabeth Rhyne sat down to discuss the project and its findings. The conversation, among its topics, touched on the scale of the demographic shifts at hand, the opportunities in these changes, where we are with pension services, and action areas for policymakers, providers, and support organizations.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, Fellow, CFI
Marisol is a 69-year-old woman in Aguablanca, a mid-sized community near the coast in Colombia. She hasn’t saved much for her older years. She receives a small social pension—about a dollar per day—from the public pension program, Colombia Mayor. While it provides an income floor for her, Marisol would like to be working as an entrepreneur. She even has a plan: “If I had a little capital, I could buy chicken legs, beef, and bananas here at a cheap price and then sell them in the Pacific towns at three or four times the price. And then I could bring back fish from the coast to sell here at the fairs.” But she cannot get a loan because of the age caps on credit at the financial institutions that operate in her area.
Marisol explains that it is not her lack of zeal or a declining health that is keeping her from increasing her income through this business dream of hers. “Strength and desire do not fail me,” she says. “It’s the money that I lack.”
Marisol was one of the people that we interviewed as part of the creation of an issue paper on Aging and Financial Inclusion, a project conducted by the Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign and in collaboration with HelpAge International. Her story is not unique—many older people report being denied access to credit and insurance in their later years. Most older people who had low or informal income when they were younger have not saved for their older years.
The new paper examines the unmet financing needs of older adults, a population segment growing rapidly in developing countries. With a focus on Latin America, the paper discusses the barriers to and market opportunities in expanding financial access to aging populations.
> Posted by Eric Zuehlke, Web and Communications Director, CFI
#451633776 / gettyimages.com
Financial inclusion stories and research are published daily, lauding various efforts to bring lower-income people into the formal banking fold. All progress deserves celebration, but also closer examination. When a new initiative takes effect, or a new service deployed, how does that advance us in achieving financial inclusion? A backdrop of sound measurement is critical. A BBVA research team, Noelia Cámara and David Tuesta, recently set out to construct an index that measures the extent of financial inclusion at the country or region level. The index is discussed and applied to 82 countries in the team’s new paper, Measuring Financial Inclusion: A Multidimensional Index. We were especially intrigued to learn that this research incorporates both supply and demand-side data. I recently sat down with Cámara to talk about the project, from challenges in measuring financial inclusion to the implications of the newly-available index.
1. What are the challenges in measuring financial inclusion?
Many issues arise when it comes to measuring financial inclusion. First, there is no single definition for financial inclusion universally accepted in the literature. Most definitions include three dimensions: use, quality, and access. However, when it comes to defining these dimensions, no consensus is found. For instance, the use of financial services is part of the financial inclusion concept, but it is not clear what “use of financial services” really means. Thus, several questions come to the fore: Do we consider having a bank account in the formal financial system to be a necessary condition for financial inclusion? Is having a pre-paid card or microinsurance enough to classify an individual as included? Is using electronic payment intermediation (e.g. paying bills with a mobile phone) a sufficient condition?
> Posted by Center Staff
A new micro-pension platform targeting those working as domestic laborers, appropriately named Gift a Pension, launched in India last month. The platform is run by the Micro Pension Foundation (MPF) nonprofit and gives employers of domestic laborers a convenient way to support their workers in enrolling for the National Pension Scheme (NPS) Lite government product, a smaller version of the NPS offering. Across the country an estimated 40 million work for households in roles including maids, guards, cooks, and drivers. In the weeks since the program opened, over 1,000 domestic employers have registered themselves and gifted pensions to their workers. The platform offers more than its name suggests, as gifting workers five-year term life insurance is also available.
Here’s how the service works. First, MPF encourages employers ensure that their workers understand the structure and benefits of any accounts before enrollment happens. The Gift a Pension site includes a collection of educational tools and videos for employers to use to aid their workers’ familiarity with products and with the importance of managing finances for the long-term. Once this initial learning phase is complete, the employer registers themselves with the Gift a Pension site and enrolls their worker using information from the various documents that satisfy the necessary know-your-customer requirements. To open the account, the employer pays a one-time servicing fee (Rs 300) as well as the first contribution into the account. The worker then receives in the mail a guide to go along with their new account and their personal prepaid pension card. In a few weeks’ time the worker will also receive a government-issued Permanent Retirement Account Number (PRAN).
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.
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