You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Technology-Enabled Business Models’ tag.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
Today the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI) is proud to launch the Financial Inclusion 2020 Progress Report, an interactive website that portrays the recent progress and unmet challenges on the path to global financial inclusion.
When we began the FI2020 project in 2011, we hoped to create a sense of both urgency and possibility. We believed that enabling everyone in the world to gain access to quality financial services was a goal of major development significance. We also saw that with many active players and the promise that digitization would enable many more people to be reached at lower cost, it was no longer simply wishful thinking to call for full inclusion within a reasonable time frame. Global financial inclusion had entered the realm of the possible.
Today, in 2015, we are both astonished by the progress and daunted by the gaps that remain. Global Findex data shows 700 million new accounts in the three years from 2011 to 2014, reducing the number of unbanked worldwide from 2.5 to 2 billion. National governments have created ambitious financial inclusion strategies, the FinTech industry is exploding with $12 billion in global investments in 2014 alone, and the World Bank has a plan for reaching universal financial access to transaction accounts by 2020.
Our quantitative review, By the Numbers, revealed that if the current trajectory of expansion in accounts continues, many countries will achieve full account access by 2020. The rails are being laid at a rapid rate, and there is great momentum toward universal access. But access to an account is not the same thing as financial inclusion, and progress toward meaningful financial inclusion, in which people actively use a full range of services, is lagging. The passengers – customers – are often still waiting at the station for services that take them where they want to go.
> 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 Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
#181165936 / gettyimages.com
The CFI’s Financial Inclusion 2020 project team has been talking to the experts lately to get their views on the main recommendations that came out of our 2013 Roadmap to Inclusion process.
One of the high level recommendations was as follows:
Regulators need to craft regulation that allows technology-enabled business models to emerge, while balancing access and protection for base of the pyramid consumers.
We asked some of the experts to give their views on whether this recommendation is moving forward across the developing world. The general response was, “Not fast enough,” and so we probed to find out more about what is getting in the way.
Many of the players in financial inclusion envision a rich technology-enabled ecosystem in which customers can affordably use electronic means to make payments (inter-operably, of course) and to access savings, credit, and other financial services. In this vision, providers sometimes compete and sometimes partner to offer various services. Financial institutions, telecommunication companies, payment providers, governments, and others find themselves part of a complex network that seamlessly enables consumers to manage and enhance their financial lives.
Facebook
Twitter
Recent Comments