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> Posted by Innocent Ephraim, Ignacio Mas, and Daniel S. Mhina
The following post was originally published on NextBillion and has been re-published with permission.
Like their counterparts in countries across Africa and around the world, a large number of Tanzanians have flocked to emerging mobile payment solutions, whether it’s to send money home, facilitate informal business transactions, pay bills or buy pre-paid electricity. The reality, however – in both Tanzania and many other markets – is that most digital accounts are empty and serve mainly, if not exclusively, as a pass-through for such payments. This limits the transformational potential of mobile money.
In a recent Financial Sector Deepening Trust (FSDT) Focus Note, we point out several factors that make digital accounts an illogical store of value for people who live precariously on low and uncertain incomes, and face health or weather-related shocks which can easily overwhelm their means. From it we derive six ways in which providers can help make digital storage of value more attractive.
PROVIDE BOTH FRICTION AND FLOW
First, digital accounts need to deliver both fast and convenient payments (“flow”) as well as illiquidity features to support people’s mental hierarchies for different kinds of money, based on their origin or purpose (“friction”). How can one savings account or mobile wallet deliver both friction and flow? Features need to be introduced that give users more of a sense of control over when they need flow and when they want friction. Only then can digital accounts play a significant role in helping people manage their money tensions, which, unlike day-to-day payments, play out in time.
> Posted by ideas42
The following post was originally published on the ideas42 blog.
It’s simply a fact that many products, policies, and services created specifically to benefit everyday people are either under-used or not used at all. Whether it’s helpful savings tools, financial aid for education, or comprehensive health insurance plans, many of us simply never enroll or use them despite intending to do so. So what’s going on?
One major factor is that most of these underutilized programs have been designed according to a “traditional” view of human behavior, in which designers assume that we always take the time to consider all of our options, choose what’s rationally the best option for us, and then act on it.
Behavioral science, however, breaks from this traditional model. We find that in reality, we don’t always carefully compare our options, if we even think about them at all. Likewise, if we do make a good choice, we may not necessarily follow through on it. So in order for solutions to be truly effective, they must be designed for how people really are, rather than how we imagine they should be.
This was one of the main things ideas42 kept in mind when approaching the problem of low retirement contribution rates in Mexico. Regular readers of our blog may remember that under the current pension system, Mexican workers stand to retire on just 40 percent of their current salary, unless they make additional individual contributions—yet the overwhelming majority of Mexicans aren’t taking these crucial steps to improve their savings.
FI2020 Week is a global conversation on the key actions needed to advance financial inclusion. From November 2-6, 2015, stakeholders around the world will participate in more than 30 events and share their voices over social media, with #FI2020. In recognition of the importance of savings to financial inclusion, and with the happy coincidence that World Savings Day is on October 31, we invited Chris de Noose, Managing Director of the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI) to help launch FI2020 Week with this post.
For more than 90 years, the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute – WSBI – and its members have spearheaded annually a day dedicated to promoting the virtue of people saving money.
Called World Savings Day, it was the first initiative of WSBI, which represents the interests of savings and retail banks in 80 countries. Celebrated at the end of October, the day remains relevant for members, who engage actively in celebrating it in their local areas. World Savings Day is etched in the minds of Europeans, including those from Germany, Austria, Spain, and Italy. It also is celebrated beyond Europe, in places like Brazil, India, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Thailand, for instance.
For Brussels-based WSBI and its members, World Savings Day places focus on the stabilising role played by savings and retail banking in the overall financial system. It evokes some of the ethos of local banks: responsible partners in communities; close to the customer; serving households, small and medium-sized firms (SMEs), and local authorities.
Why saving is important
Savings are important on many levels. First, savings are important for households. People save to create a nest egg, a rainy day fund – a way to financially “smooth out” some of the uncertainty in an often uncertain world. Second, and on a macro-economic level, it provides funding to banks in the form of deposits. Those savings then can be converted into loans. Loans for SMEs, for example, when they expand or retool. Savings are also important for social entrepreneurship, finance that brings to life start ups, for example.
> Posted by the Smart Campaign
Today, the Smart Campaign released for public comment new draft Client Protection Standards – which will be the basis for what we term Certification 2.0. The new standards streamline the previous Client Protection Standards, and reflect the evolving financial inclusion industry. They incorporate client risks pertaining to insurance, savings, and digital financial services. The standards operationalize where the financial inclusion industry sets the bar in terms of the minimum behaviors clients should expect from their financial service providers. Now open, the public comment period extends through November 30, 2015.
We’d love your feedback!
The new standards build off of the first set of Client Protection Standards, released in January 2013, as the basis for the introduction of Smart Certification. The standards and their corresponding indicators, which put the Client Protection Principles into practice, are used to benchmark institutions seeking Smart Certification.
Like the first iteration, the development of Certification 2.0 standards has been a highly collaborative process. Over the past 18 months, the campaign consulted a wide array of stakeholders and up to 30 experts to strengthen and update the standards and indicators.
> Posted by Center Staff
The latest edition of the Financial Inclusion 2020 News Feed, our weekly online magazine sharing the big news in banking the unbanked, is now available. Among the stories in this week’s edition are the release of a New America Foundation report on account dormancy in youth savings, Yemen exploring mobile banking to combat the hardships of war, and Cambodia launching its first agricultural insurance programs. Here are a few more details:
- The New America report considers how to understand the challenge of youth account dormancy in large-scale account-based initiatives and policy efforts, describing the range of issues related to account engagement from the perspectives of financial institutions, policymakers, and account-holders.
- Yemen, following its central bank passing regulation on e-money and mobile money in December, is looking to the development of digital finance to cover critical services during wartime, as 30 to 40 percent of bank branches are closed.
- The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC) has launched the country’s first agricultural insurance programs, in the form of pilots for the next year and a half, protecting rice farmers against loss from drought and floods.
For more information on these and other stories, read the latest issue of the FI2020 News Feed here, and make sure to subscribe to the weekly online magazine by entering your email address in the right-hand menu so you can be notified when the latest issue comes out.
Have you come across a story or initiative you think we should cover? Email your ideas to Eric Zuehlke at .
> Posted by Sonja E. Kelly, Fellow, CFI
Financial Inclusion 2020 (FI2020) is a global multi-stakeholder movement to achieve full financial inclusion, using the year 2020 as a focal point for action. This blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe and share insights from key thought leaders in financial inclusion, with a specific focus on quality beyond access.
Tuesday marked a historic day for Peru: the country launched its National Financial Inclusion Strategy. While Peru has been lauded in the past for its environment for financial inclusion, its public-private sector partnerships, and its leadership in conversations on international banking standards, this national strategy elevates Peru’s commitment to financial inclusion to a new level. In particular, we want to celebrate the strategy’s commitments to consumer protection, financial literacy, and the inclusion of vulnerable people.
Analysis of the World Bank Global Findex this year revealed that countries that have a national strategy (not merely a commitment or stand-alone programs) for financial inclusion saw twice as much bank account access growth in the last three years compared to countries that did not have a national strategy. For Peru, this is great news, as according to the same data source, less than 30 percent of adults in the country had access to an account in 2014.
The path to financial inclusion articulated in the strategy, however, is not focused on access to accounts, making Peru an outlier among its peers that have implemented national strategies. Instead, Peru has oriented its strategy toward improving systems for accessing a range of products and promoting supportive consumer protection, financial education, and attention to the most vulnerable. The national strategy has seven different lines of action: Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Eric Zuehlke, Web and Communications Director, CFI
One theme we come across repeatedly at CFI is the discrepancy between financial services access and usage. A central tenet of our vision of financial inclusion is that access isn’t enough; financial services need to meet client needs and actually be used. One example is mobile banking. As is now well known, millions are now accessing financial services for the first time with mobile payment platforms through telcos. As our By the Numbers report found, however, the proportion of financial services accounts that are mobile is much smaller for the world in general – East Africa is the outlier.
I just returned from an exciting two-week assignment through Accion’s Ambassador program with Akiba Commercial Bank in Tanzania. I met with Akiba staff, visited branch offices, and talked with clients. (You can read about my experiences, including a trip to Zanzibar and terrifying/awesome motorcycle taxi trips on the Ambassador blog.) Since I was in the region with the world’s highest adoption of mobile banking, I wanted to take the opportunity to learn more about how Akiba’s mobile banking experience has worked out, both from staff and client perspectives. Has adoption and usage met expectations? What kind of feedback was Akiba hearing from clients? What challenges was Akiba facing with their mobile platform?
> Posted by Eric Zuehlke, Web and Communications Director, CFI
The following post was originally published on the Accion Ambassadors blog.
At some point during our walk down the dusty, uneven road packed with minibuses and motorcycles inches away from hitting me, unfamiliar music and sounds blasting from unseen speakers, people selling everything from plastic toys to Adidas shorts to cell phones to furniture, and a profusion of life and color all around, I thought to myself, “This is exactly what I was hoping to see in Tanzania.”
My fellow Accion Ambassador Javier and I were walking with a staff member from Akiba’s headquarters office and Dominik, the assistant branch manager at Akiba’s Temeke branch. Akiba is a commercial microfinance institution based in Dar es Salaam with branches throughout Tanzania. The four of us were off to visit clients down the street from the branch office. Before our walk, Dominik shared some background on Akiba’s work and their clients.
While every Akiba client has a deposit account, not every client has a loan. So for example, the Temeke branch serves over 4,000 clients – 2,100 have a loan while around 2,000 only have deposit accounts. However, “savings is a big problem,” Dominik tells us. “People are not saving regularly.” This is partially because Akiba has only recently promoted savings as part of their client outreach and education. The Temeke branch’s clients are all in the neighborhood and are food vendors, manage their own clothing or cell phone shops, or own other small businesses. The branch’s clients tend to be at Akiba’s “medium” level, with loans ranging from 20 million to 50 million shillings (about US$10,000 to US$25,000 – a much higher amount than I was expecting to be normal). Group solidarity loans are also popular and are smaller loans ranging from 200,000 to 5 million shillings (US$100 to US$2,500).
> Posted by Danielle Piskadlo, Manager, Investing in Inclusive Finance, CFI
My proudest moments as a parent are when my 2-year-old son finds change lying around the house and runs excitedly to put it in his piggybank. We never consciously did anything to encourage this behavior. I like to think it is due to some small part of my DNA shining through.
The recent CFI and HelpAge report, Aging and Financial Inclusion: An Opportunity, highlights that most people expect to use accumulated savings and assets to fund their retirement, but in reality end up relying primarily on support from family, friends, and the government.
I’ve blogged in the past about how much trouble people have with saving. And it seems financial intuitions for their part use every imaginable mechanism to make it easy (pension contributions at 7/11, behavioral nudges for opting employees into retirement plans), fun (prize-linked savings, lotteries, and games), or obligatory (compulsory savings as a loan requirement) for their clients to save.
I have always believed that the ability to save is a key piece of financial security, and that building the financial capability to save at a young age has a profound impact on financial security throughout a person’s life, even into the retirement years. Recent research undertaken by CFED to “deepen our understanding of youth financial capability and explore the behaviors, types of knowledge and personality characteristics that help children and youth achieve financial well-being in adulthood” supports that belief. The research included an extensive literature review of consumer science, developmental psychology, and related fields to explore the factors that comprise youth financial capability, as well as how and when these abilities are developed.
> Posted by Sonja Kelly, CFI, and Thierry van Bastelaer, Abt Associates, American University, and the Microinsurance Network
Even 10 years ago, most of us would never have thought that the words “insurance” and “low-income households in the developing world” would be heard in the same sentence. It would have been as strange as, say, hearing the words “really good coffee” and “Washington, D.C.” in the same sentence.
But times have changed. Thanks to tremendous innovation in product design, pricing, and distribution systems, insurance is increasingly affordable to low-income households that are looking for ways to protect themselves from daily risky events. We should take a few moments to stop and celebrate this development. (Pause for celebration.) Thank you.
At the same time, we should learn from the history of the broader financial inclusion field. It took many years for the majority of the field to admit that credit alone can’t meet all the financial needs of poor families. Hopefully the excitement over insurance will not similarly delay the realization that it alone can’t address all the financial protection needs of these families. A great variety of financial products is needed to address an even greater diversity of needs.
So, over a cup of really good coffee one afternoon in Washington, D.C., we sketched out a possible framework that articulates where insurance fits into the product spectrum for financial risk protection vis-a-vis savings and loans.¹
We thought of risk protection expenses along two axes: frequency and size, and plotted expenses on a 2×2 table (forgive our back-of-the-napkin scribble).
Financially inclusive products are best designed to finance risk management expenses in the top left and bottom right quadrants of the graph. High-frequency inexpensive outlays can, when accumulating over time, significantly disrupt the cash flows of low-income families. Similarly, low-frequency expensive payments can ruin years of carefully planned asset accumulation. Low-frequency and inexpensive events (bottom left) can usually be covered by cash, and high-frequency expensive events (top right) are usually beyond the reach of most financial inclusion products.
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