You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Roadmap to Financial Inclusion’ tag.
> Posted by Julia Arnold, Research Consultant
A colleague recently shared a story about helping a friend’s housekeeper open a Jan Dhan Yojana account in India – a free bank account offered through India’s massive new financial inclusion scheme. After being stonewalled by the bank teller and yelled at by the assistant manager, who insisted the bank no longer offered the account, my colleague and the housekeeper were ushered into the bank manager’s office. The bank manager proceeded to ask the housekeeper for multiple forms of ID, none of which are required for the Jan Dhan Yojana account. Only when the bank manager recognized my colleague as a financial inclusion expert and author of a scathing newspaper article on the Indian banking sector, did he “make an exception”. When the housekeeper returned the following day to get her debit card, she was asked for payment. Luckily, she pointed to a copy of a pamphlet in the local language, which showed that she should be allowed to open the account without a deposit. Now, after all that, she is a member of the formal banking system of India.
What this story shows is that a decree that banks must offer a financial product to the unbanked is not enough. Educating frontline staff, shifting workplace culture, and strengthening consumer protection laws are all key changes needed to enable genuine inclusion.
So is advancing financial capability. Financial capability refers to a person’s knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behavior, as demonstrated in informed personal financial choices and outcomes. In this case, the housekeeper had access to a personal financial inclusion expert to help her navigate her relationship with the bank, but few people are so lucky.
> Posted by Juan Blanco, Associate, Financial Inclusion 2020, CFI
In the client protection section of the FI2020 Roadmap to Financial Inclusion, a specific recommendation was made for financial providers to embrace consumer protection as part of their professional identity, and applying a “financial consumer bill of rights” was identified as a key action point.
Looking into the state of this industry area for our upcoming FI2020 Progress Report on Financial Inclusion, I came to realize that the subject of consumers’ bills of rights is not as straightforward as it seems. Although the recommendation from the roadmap was aimed specifically at providers, the truth is that this is an area where a diversity of players is getting involved. I found a range of approaches: codes of conduct, codes of ethics, charters of rights, and bills of rights, coming from a wide spread of stakeholders, from MFIs to global associations to governments. At the heart of each of these initiatives was the same objective: for service providers to operate ethically and responsibly.
> Posted by Susy Cheston, Senior Advisor, CFI
The Credit Reporting section of the FI2020 e-zine (click to read)
The Financial Inclusion 2020 Round-Up 2014 e-zine, found on the CFI website, takes a look at progress toward financial inclusion in the year following the FI2020 Global Forum. It was at the Global Forum that five Roadmaps to Financial Inclusion were presented after two years of being developed and debated by dozens of financial inclusion experts. Now, imagine the editorial challenge of collapsing a year’s worth of activity around each Roadmap into just two pages each.
While it’s a fun read, I admit to a little cognitive dissonance as I page through the Round-Up. The brief analyses of where we stand around each of the Roadmaps to Financial Inclusion can be summed up in the quote “we’re not as far along as we think we are.” While that quote was about the Technology Roadmap, it could just as easily be said of the other Roadmaps: Financial Capability, Addressing Customer Needs, Client Protection, and Credit Reporting.
Yet despite the clear-eyed look at the ongoing challenges, the e-zine also tells a story of intense and productive activity by a wide range of actors. Legacy financial service providers—the heavy hitters with big resources and even greater reach—are investing heavily in financial inclusion. It’s not just for corporate social responsibility any more; it’s part of a new business strategy inspired by the discovery of an untapped and (they hope) profitable new market. Sprinkled in and around those vignettes are stories of scrappy start-ups doing the social entrepreneurship thing. Some of those services may not make it past 2015, but some of them have a “why didn’t I think of that” inevitability about them. The diversity of actors and the energy are impressive.
> Posted by Allyse McGrath, Senior Associate, FI2020, CFI
Once in a while, we in the Accion D.C. office gather in our state-of-the-art movie theater (a.k.a. conference room) for some collective viewing. Now that the World Cup has ended, this viewing has a lot less to do with fútbol and more to do with our day jobs. Last Friday’s feature was a recently-released documentary that highlights those who are left behind by the U.S. financial system. Spent: Looking For Change follows four households who represent the quarter of American households that are underserved and held back by the current financial system.
The film focuses on how families with precarious financial and economic lives end up using services like check cashers, title loans, and payday loans – the tools that those without bank accounts or with poor credit must rely on in the absence of affordable and accessible financial services. In one example, a former nurse and single mother had to stop working to care for an incapacitated family member. She turned to title loans to pay the bills and when she couldn’t keep up the loan repayments, the title company repossessed her car. Another family, which took out one $450 payday loan, is now stuck in a cycle of high interest rates and hidden fees because the family’s income is not high enough to pay off the debt altogether. Each narrative helps us understand why, in 2012, underserved Americans spent an estimated $89 billion on interest and fees.
> Posted by Susy Cheston, Senior Advisor, 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.”
The Financial Inclusion 2020 project has centered around a set of five roadmaps, each covering a major challenge in reaching full inclusion: financial capability, addressing customer needs, client protection, technology, and credit reporting. At the Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum in October, participants met in focused roundtable sessions to talk about moving the roadmap recommendations toward action. In this post we highlight some of the main takeaways from these roundtables.
1. What works? We need evidence! Many of the roundtables dreamed of a clearinghouse of case studies, research, country examples, and other evidence on the effectiveness of different approaches to technology, financial capability, and client protection. Part of the dream was a platform for governments and providers to share and disseminate their experiences.
2. We want metrics. Are our services customer-centric? Do we have effective client protection practices? Do we track complaints? Do we know who is or is not opting in to our services? And are we getting all the data we have into the hands of people who can use it to make our services better?
3. Who’s at the table? The drivers of financial inclusion within governments are not just bank regulators, but telecommunications, insurance, and utility regulators, and many ministries (finance, agriculture, social welfare, education, etc.).
> Posted by Center Staff
The FI2020 Global Forum in London gets underway this Sunday with a pre-Forum side meeting on financial inclusion for persons with disabilities (PWDs). This client-centric start feels like a fitting precursor for an event to expand financial inclusion.
Financial inclusion requires that financial services meet the unique needs of all clients, especially the needs of the most underserved and vulnerable client groups. Sessions throughout the Forum reflect this key tenet. In addition, there are side meetings on the Financial Capability Roadmap and the Consumer Protection Roadmap, focused on moving these roadmap principles and recommendations to action. These and the other three financial inclusion roadmaps were developed through a consultative process that collected and incorporated the perspectives of specific client groups.
Among Forum participants are representatives of various client segments – such as PWDs, women, the elderly, youth, rural populations, and migrants – to help raise awareness of their unique needs and assets. Here’s a collection of pertinent statistics for financial inclusion on these client segments:
Youth:
- 1.8 billion of the world’s population is between the ages of 10 and 24
- 87 percent of youth are concentrated in the developing world
- About half the world’s youth report being economically active
- 38 percent of young adults have an account compared to over 54 percent of older adults
The Elderly:
- In 1950, globally, 1 in 20 people were elderly. By 2050, it will be 1 in 5.
- In 2000, only 6 percent of people in less developed countries were over 65 years old. By 2050, that number will grow to 20 percent.
> Posted by Center Staff
The Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum is a few days away! Kicking off with side sessions this Sunday the 27th on persons with disabilities and the Microfinance CEO Working Group, the landmark event for expanding global financial inclusion is almost here.
Taking place on October 28-30 in London, the event will convene approximately 300 leaders in financial inclusion, spanning sectors and industries, in a collaborative environment where they can map the action agenda for achieving financial inclusion by the year 2020. Participants include key players from the financial sector, technology providers and the corporate sector, international non-profits, and public policymakers. For the full list of attendees, click here.
The Forum agenda includes an assortment of session types, with a number of opportunities for participant engagement. In one roundtable breakout session, participants will discuss how to take the Roadmap recommendations from ideas to action, identifying priorities for implementation. Other sessions include a Forum-opening discussion on factors that put financial inclusion by 2020 within reach, a plenary on mobile money and spurring innovation, a presentation on the forthcoming CFI report Opportunities & Obstacles in Peru, and a fireside chat and Q&A with Ajay Banga and Michael Schlein, CEO’s of MasterCard and Accion. For the full agenda, click here.
Along with Banga and Schlein, Forum speakers include Cherie Blair, Founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, CEO of Access Bank, Nick Hughes, Founder of M-PESA and M-KOPA, Duvvuri Subbarao, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Bindu Ananth, President of IMFR Trust. For the full speakers list, which includes a handful of newly confirmed speakers, click here.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
The following post was originally published on the World Bank Private Sector Development Blog.
The issue of financial inclusion seems to be everywhere – from the World Bank Annual Meetings to the new UN post-2015 development goals. It’s got buzz in the private sector, public sector and development organizations big and small. Policymakers are increasingly making financial inclusion a priority through specific financial inclusion targets and commitments, such as the Alliance for Financial Inclusion’s Maya Declaration. In fact, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim recently launched an initiative “to provide universal financial access to all working-age adults by 2020.”
As we know from the Global Findex, more than 2.5 billion people lack access to even a basic bank account — a huge gap in inclusion and an enormous opportunity. Demographic changes, economic growth, and advances in technology are making global financial inclusion more possible than ever before. With a massive new market of people demanding new services as incomes rise among the bottom 40 percent, the stage is set for dramatic leaps in access in the next few years. Emerging technologies are bringing down costs and opening new business models while providing greater access to a range of services.
Recognizing that the time is ripe for significant progress on financial inclusion, the Center for Financial Inclusion developed a consultative process aimed to raise everyone’s sights about the possibilities of achieving full inclusion within a foreseeable timeframe – using the year 2020 as a focal point. The process sought to build a more cohesive financial inclusion “community” through the development of a common vision. It brought together experts from the World Bank, IFC, and CGAP along with many representatives of the private sector and the social sector. Financial Inclusion 2020’s Roadmap to Financial Inclusion is the result.
With all of the financial inclusion buzz, you would think that we would be closer to full inclusion. But if closing the gaps were easy, it would have happened already. Many factors still stand in the way. In the case of regulatory accommodation to new technology, for example, the gaps result from such factors as the pace of the spread of know-how among policymakers globally, national legislative and political processes, and uncertainty about the risks involved with new models. In the case of fully addressing the needs of customers at the base of the pyramid (BOP), gaps stem from a combination of doubt among providers about the likely profitability of these customers and limited knowledge inside institutions about the financial lives of the poor. In the case of client protection, providers face perverse incentives, while many regulatory bodies are only beginning the major task of establishing robust oversight of market conduct.
We see encouraging examples of financial inclusion in the most remote corners of the world, often done by surprising actors. However, the momentum is uneven. The Roadmap process included many of the thinkers and entrepreneurs behind such initiatives. Each of the five working groups — Addressing Customer Needs, Technology, Financial Capability, Client Protection and Credit Reporting — has developed a roadmap to direct the world community toward the actions most needed to achieve FI2020’s vision of full financial inclusion. Most of the recommendations are addressed either to governments or to providers, but they point the way to actions needed by a range of supporting organizations, including multilateral and bilateral organizations, donors, social investors and non-profits, at both the global and the national levels.
> 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.”
Since Sendhil Mullainathan is speaking at our Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum in two weeks, we ordered a few copies of his new book with Eldar Shafir to pass around the office. As a result, the hypotheses of Scarcity are informing our thinking both on our own habits and on financial inclusion.
The title of the session in which Mullainathan, a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, is speaking is “Why Financial Inclusion Means More Than We Ever Knew.” A mouthful, yes, and a bit mysterious. To unravel the mystery, one has to start with Mullainathan’s hypothesis that scarcity of some kind of resource—money, time, even social relationships—brings about an intense focus on the scarce resource, a focus that has negative effects on the way we think and act in areas of our lives outside that of the scarce resource. If this is true, financial inclusion is a game-changer that both prevents scarcity and alleviates its effects.
On first reading, Mullainathan and Shafir’s book seems to apply immediately to my own life. In my case, a scarcity of time means that I often adopt a focus on time and resulting tunnel vision for the task at hand. This focus has some positive effects—I produce work much faster than I would if I had more time. And it has some negative effects—I forget special events like my closest friend’s birthday (I’m sorry, Sarah! Does mentioning you in this blog post make up for it?). In essence, the authors contend that the single-minded focus that severe scarcity creates absorbs so much psychic energy, mindspace, bandwith, or whatever you may call it, that rational decision-making suffers.
This tunneling—devoting a great deal of bandwidth to a single resource—produces intense focus on the scarce resource, but also catastrophic failure on the things that get neglected to make “space” for such a focus.
> Posted by Center Staff
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’re excited to announce the launch of the Roadmap to Financial Inclusion, a major initiative of Financial Inclusion 2020.
Through an extensive consultative process, we developed a set of recommendations to move financial inclusion forward, using the year 2020 to galvanize thought and action. Each of five working groups, with participation from a diversity of countries and stakeholder groups from the public and private sectors, developed a “roadmap” that serves as a springboard for dialogue and action. Individual conversations with experts and practitioners informed the roadmaps, as well.
The resulting roadmap principles and recommendations are meant to help keep the financial inclusion community focused and accountable for guiding inclusion in a direction that will fulfill its promise to improve lives and boost economies. They demonstrate the need for a strong demand-side orientation, signaling that financial inclusion is not just about expanding access, but also about ensuring quality so that usage will be high and customers will benefit. Some recommendations are directed at financial service providers, while others focus on governments and regulators. Support organizations, ranging from technology companies to international funders, are also addressed.
Here are the core roadmap principles, as well as a sample recommendation from each roadmap.
Financial Capability: Shift the Paradigm
Currently, the paradigm for financial capability is focused on financial education as knowledge transfer. Instead, we must think of financial capability in light of its end goal: sound financial choices and behavior. People learn best by doing. To achieve this, stakeholders involved in financial inclusion have a responsibility to integrate financial capability building into every aspect of their work and products, both with current and prospective customers. The scale of the need means that many actors are welcome, including providers, governments, non-profits, schools, and others.
Sample recommendation: Providers can use electronic customer touch-points to support financial capability at low cost, for example, SMS reminders that alert clients before a loan is due or encourage regular savings.
Facebook
Twitter
Recent Comments