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> Posted by Nadia van de Walle, Senior Africa Specialist, the Smart Campaign
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The marijuana industry is burgeoning. While consumer demand has always spurred this black market business, commerce has expanded over the last few years with the legalization of medical use in 23 U.S. states and recreational use in Washington, Colorado, and (just a few days ago) Washington, D.C. It may come as a surprise that cannabis growers and sellers face some steep financial inclusion challenges.
Despite state decriminalization or legalization, marijuana remains a “controlled substance” per federal statutes and unfortunately for “Ganga Station” or “Glorious Buds” it is federal jurisdiction that matters when it comes to the banking sector and disciplining its dealings with what it categorizes as illegal enterprise. As a result, banks must ultimately worry about criminal charges. Most decide the risks associated with pot proprietors as clients are too high. As a result of their limbo position between state and federal law and enforcement, those in the business are increasingly speaking about their frustrations in being unbanked.
> Posted by Matt Collin, Research Fellow, the Center for Global Development
The following post was originally published on the Center for Global Development blog.
In a few weeks’ time Australia’s Westpac bank will start closing down the accounts of money transfer organizations used by immigrants to send money home. Westpac is the last major Australian bank still offering services to organizations in the country’s US$25 billion remittance sector.
Two weeks ago, Merchant’s Bank of California also decided to close the accounts of all money transfer organizations (MTOs) sending money to Somalia. The source of Merchant’s decision appears to have been a cease-and-desist order issued by the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) in June, purportedly due to the bank’s failure to appropriately monitor the destination of remitted funds.
Unfortunately, we’re seeing a trend here. In 2013, Barclays’ closed the accounts of nearly 90 percent of its U.K.-based MTOs, despite being the last large bank in the country willing to do business with remitters. HSBC made the same decision the previous year, following a nearly US$2 billion penalty handed down by U.S. regulators.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
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Obtaining a mortgage is often the single largest transaction a person will ever make. Despite this, about half of Americans actively consider only one lender or broker before taking out their mortgage. Why? A new report from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) details this phenomenon and some of the factors in play, especially consumer confidence. Tuesday, at an event releasing the report, CFPB Director Richard Cordray put the reality into stark and relatable terms, positing that many individuals spend more time shopping around for a TV or other household appliance than they do looking for a good mortgage. He remarked, “When you are spending a lot of money, you are literally betting the house on the choices you are making.” At the event, Cordray launched a suite of tools from the CFPB to empower informed decision-making. The hope is that these tools will ultimately get Americans to… shop.
Cordray recommends that mortgage seekers fill out applications with multiple lenders to see which one offers the best deal. Filing multiple applications doesn’t hurt one’s credit score, contrary to popular belief; multiple credit checks from potential lenders within a certain time window (generally 14-45 days) are considered a single inquiry. The CFPB report, which is based on new data in the National Survey of Mortgage Borrowers, found that 77 percent of borrowers only apply with a single lender.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, Fellow, CFI
Last week in Mexico City, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to voice their hope for a better Mexico. In a hotel that overlooked the demonstration, members of the World Savings Bank Institute met to talk about how to make a safer and more effective financial system for those at the base of the pyramid. In terms of inclusive finance, in recent months we’ve seen significant progress. During the meeting, Vice President of the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV) in Mexico, Bernardo Gonzalez, opened his remarks by putting up a list of the top 10 countries in this year’s Global Microscope. Modestly, he pointed out that five of the 10 were from Latin America. Perhaps more emphatically, he highlighted Mexico’s place—fifth on the list.
As a regulator, he should be proud. Mexico’s score this year is in part a reflection of the regulatory reforms that the country has been moving forward, with attention to customers at the base of the economic pyramid. While Mexico’s microfinance sector has been under scrutiny in recent years because of notoriously high interest rates, concerns of over-indebtedness, and commercial banks hesitant to go “down-market”, a new set of microfinance regulations attempts to change things.
> Posted by Center Staff
The 2015 Harvard Business School – Accion Program on Strategic Leadership in Inclusive Finance is now accepting applications for what will be another exceptional week of learning and exchange among world leaders in financial inclusion. The program will take place April 6-11, 2015 at the HBS campus in Boston, Massachusetts.
The 2015 HBS-Accion Program builds on nine successful years and over 550 participants – CEOs, presidents, executive directors, and other high-level professionals – from roughly 100 countries.
Today’s landscape of financial services for the base of the pyramid is increasingly complex, with a diversity of products, providers, and support organizations extending services to previously excluded populations. Disruptive technologies and new ways of doing business are creating new possibilities for reaching more people with more types of services. It’s an exciting time for financial inclusion, though for leaders steering their organizations through this landscape, the pace and magnitude of change may look overwhelming. Financial service providers participating in the program will benefit from the guidance of some of the world’s best business minds to better understand the possibilities and the pitfalls of today’s financial services marketplace. Policymakers, regulators, and investors will find it valuable to get a closer look at how the industry is evolving in countries around the world.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, Fellow, CFI
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in taking a close look at financial inclusion efforts around the world, it’s that context matters. That’s why we are excited to be part of the team releasing the Global Microscope 2014: The Enabling Environment for Financial Inclusion. The Microscope is carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) with sponsorship and guidance from the Multilateral Investment Fund of the IDB, CAF, and Citi. The Microscope evaluates the environment for financial inclusion in 55 different countries and provides powerful signals to policymakers in each country on their progress. Which countries topped the list and which have the most room to grow?
We’ll tell you, but first, it’s important to know what the results mean. Each country inspected in the Microscope is assessed on 12 indicators that consider best practices in national regulatory environments and institutional support for providers serving clients at the base of the pyramid. Indicators range from government support for financial inclusion, to supervision of microfinance and other financial products, the status of credit reporting, regulations governing mobile banking and, last but not least, consumer protection.
This year is an important one in the publication’s eight year history because the focus shifted from microfinance to the environment for financial inclusion, a process that involved adapting the framework to account for today’s diversity of providers and products. What we were surprised by, however, was just how little a difference this made in the rankings. We charted last year’s results on the microfinance environment against this year’s results on the financial inclusion environment and we found a very high correlation between the two (see figure below). Environments that are enabling for microfinance are often environments that are enabling for financial inclusion. Six countries from last year’s top 10 were in this year’s top ten. Read the rest of this entry »
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This is our first in a series of responses to the provocative post last week from Ignacio Mas. Ignacio asks why the “current innovation frenzy in digital financial services in the U.S.” does not translate into action in BoP markets across the world, and puts forth a number of hypotheses.
“There are three things none of these digital players want to deal with – and never will. They do not want to get a banking license that embroils them in onerous regulation. They do not want to conduct primary identity checks on their customers (Know Your Customer, or KYC), which require physical customer contact. And they do not want to touch their customers’ cash.”
What follows is a response from Tahira Dosani and Vikas Raj of Accion’s Venture Lab, which invests in new fintech start-ups.
While it is true that much of the current innovation in digital financial services has been focused on higher-end consumer segments and less on financial inclusion, in our view this has not been a result only of digital players’ intentions. In fact, mainstream digital financial service companies’ difficulties in serving the financially excluded arise primarily from three key factors – cost, connectivity, and capability. Simply put, these customers are more expensive to acquire, harder to access, and require targeted products, pricing, and distribution. Customers that are banked, connected, and well-understood are the low-hanging fruit today, and that is why they are targeted by large players.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
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What are the most important unanswered questions in financial inclusion?
Last week I was fortunate to participate in the small, idea-packed Conference on Financial Inclusion at Harvard Business School, organized by Professor Rajiv Lal. The attendees were a high-level microcosm of the financial inclusion world, a sort of mini-Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum. A prime purpose of the gathering was to identify a potential research agenda.
Among the ideas emerging from very rich conversations, I identified three distinct areas of research: business questions that could be addressed through HBS’s famous case method; research focused on regulation; and social science research focused on consumers. Because what one says at HBS stays at HBS, I cannot identify who offered what idea, but here is a brief summary.
In this thoughtful and provocative blog post Ignacio Mas lays down a series of challenges for everyone working on financial inclusion. We think that the questions he’s asking need to be talked about. We’re asking three experts — on customer-centricity, on fintech start-ups, and on regulation — to respond to his provocations, and for the next three Wednesdays we’ll publish one of them.
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Have you noticed how narrow the interventions of the chorus of financial inclusion supporters have become? Academic researchers are immersed in proving whether an SMS message sent at the right time can push people to repay their loans more promptly (a.k.a. nudges), or whether someone with more savings is likely to be happier and more empowered in some way (a.k.a. impact evaluations). NGOs fund numerous papers and conferences to promote the idea of seeking early and frequent customer feedback in product design (a.k.a. human-centered design), or of looking into customer data for some clue as to what interests them and how they behave (a.k.a. big data). Donors set up round after round of tenders with subsidized funds to spur fully-grown banks and telcos to try out a new product feature (a.k.a. challenge grants), or to prop up the marketing and distribution wherewithal of selected players (a.k.a. capacity building).
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, Fellow, CFI
Sound financial inclusion regulation and policy does not an ethical financial system make. In financial inclusion, we often talk about the importance of consumer protection, industry transparency, and fair market conditions. In the absence of universal standards of what these principles look like in practice, we turn to regulators and policymakers. I contend that we cannot keep relying on regulation to make the financial system moral and just. Since much of my own research promotes financial inclusion policy and regulation, this is a fairly inflammatory statement for me to make. But when we look only to regulators to create a financially inclusive and fair marketplace, we miss the mark.
In my own life, I see an analogy to our family game night. I am a very competitive person. I confess that there are times (fairly frequent times) that I cheat. I can easily miscount the number of spaces my piece is moving in Monopoly, or I can set down three cards and make it look like one card in Uno. My husband sometimes catches me, or my efforts to cheat simply aren’t drastic enough, so very rarely do I change the outcome of the game. But no number of rules can keep me from trying. Nevertheless, I’m sure my husband would agree that rules and regulations are not sufficient. Game night would be far more ethical if, instead of relying on the game rules, we relied on our responsibility to one another (check back with me in a few months to ask how a recalibration of my own internal compass is going).
In his remarks to during the recent World Bank Annual Meetings, the Most Reverend Justin Welby (Archbishop of Canterbury) emphasized that ethics in finance is not about creating carrots and sticks, but about doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do. Welby’s charge to participants in the meeting, including Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde, recognizes the necessity of the personal ethical compass—not solely a reliance on regulators.
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