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> Posted by Center Staff
Janautthan Samudayic Laghubitta Bikash Bank Limited event in Nepal
This post is part of Financial Inclusion Week, a week of global conversation on advancing financial inclusion. This year’s theme is keeping clients first in a digital world. Throughout the week participants will share their thoughts in events and webinars, on social media, and through blog posts. Add your voice to the conversation using #FinclusionWeek.
It is day three of Financial Inclusion Week 2016 and while we are sad to be more than half-way through, we are so excited by the conversations that have already happened! Already, Financial Inclusion Week events have taken place in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Nepal, and Tanzania, among other locations.
Before we dive into a recap of the events that happened yesterday – we encourage you to take another look at the list of webinars happening during the rest of the week and register today to participate. Additionally, we encourage you to join the Twitter conversation with #FinclusionWeek. Starting today, CFI (@CFI_Accion) will be asking a number of questions to the Financial Inclusion Week community focused on the theme, keeping clients first in a digital world.
What’s Happening
In Luxembourg yesterday, the ADA held a panel discussion exploring keeping clients first in mobile banking and microfinance. The conversation was led by Laurent de la Vaissière, Director of the Information & Technology Risk Department at Deloitte and included Devyani Parameshwar, Lead Development Manager of M-PESA at Vodafone, and James Onyutta, Managing Director of Musoni Kenya. You can watch the full conversation below.
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> 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 prevalence of countries inadequately tracking the well-being of their older citizens; the launch of Monese, a mobile-based banking service targeting immigrants and expats in the U.K.; and CARE distilling lessons learned from its work developing sustainable agricultural value chains in a new book. Here are a few more details:
- HelpAge International recently released the 2015 Global AgeWatch index, which ranks countries on quality of life for older people based on access to pensions, healthcare, employment, and further education. The index had to exclude 98 countries that don’t sufficiently collect such data on this growing population segment.
- Monese, licensed as an electronic money institution, lessens “residency restrictions” and offers accounts to those new to the U.K., providing services like cash deposits, withdrawal, and low-cost international money transfers.
- In their new book on reducing poverty via value chain development, among others, CARE shares the following takeaways: work along the entire value chain – not just with farmers; design for scale from the start; and skillfully empowering women is smart economics and the right thing to do.
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 Jeffrey Riecke, Senior Communications Associate, CFI
In most countries, you don’t hear much buzz about business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce. In the United States, for example, our eCommerce goliaths of the moment are Amazon and eBay, which focus on the business-to-consumer (B2C) segment. But this isn’t the case in China, where the B2B eCommerce industry is ballooning and drawing the rest of the world in. It grew by 32 percent to US$ 3.76 billion in revenue in 2014, and in the coming years the revenue growth rate is expected to stay over 20 percent. China’s B2B break-out market leader is Alibaba, which brought in about US$1 billion in B2B eCommerce revenue in 2014, comprising roughly 34 percent of the country market. Alibaba has been busy with B2B this spring, partnering with alternative lending startups in the United Kingdom to facilitate B2B trade between the two countries, hosting a B2B eCommerce competition in Hong Kong to support Chinese SMEs, and, as of this coming Monday, launching a new cross-border service on its 1668.com platform to facilitate foreign imports for Chinese SMEs.
> Posted by Alex Counts, President and CEO, Grameen Foundation
With increasing regularity, I hear people talking about a new concept: deploying funds to earn profit while at the same time solving complex social and environmental problems, also known as impact investing. One article that stood out for me, and in fact prompted me to write this, is “Good Investments” by Dan Morrell in the Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin. At one point the author writes: “What impact investing really needs, all agree, are pioneers.”
Impact investing advocates can sometimes give the impression that they have “outsmarted poverty” (and other societal problems) by discovering the need for this profit-making approach, one that allows high net worth individuals to further increase their assets while also having (in the words of another impact investor quoted in the HBS article) a “fabulous social impact.”
Count me as someone who does not feel that what “impact investing” needs now are “pioneers” per se. Rather, it needs pragmatic, risk-taking, deeply curious, and disciplined people with access to funding who can work collaboratively to move an old idea forward, bearing in mind the lessons of the past and the opportunities of the present.
In fact, the actual pioneers of impact investing began laying the groundwork for this latest incarnation decades ago. Think of the Ford Foundation’s work in the 1960s to establish, legitimize, and get U.S. government policy support for Program Related Investments, the “Philanthropy at Five [Percent]” movement in nineteenth century America and England, the Russell Sage Foundation’s financing of low-income housing in New York in the early 1900s, or, in more recent times, the Calvert Foundation, just to name a few.
Or simply consider the modern microfinance industry and how an ecosystem of financing mechanisms – including dozens of “microfinance investment vehicles” (MIVs) – grew up around it in the 1990s and 2000s. Even today, according to an important study by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) and JPMorgan Social Finance, close to 40 percent of impact investments are in microfinance institutions (MFIs) or funds. Microfinance is the largest single sector for receiving impact investments, and is larger than its two closest competitors combined. Clearly there are strong linkages between microfinance and impact investing, and additional opportunities for sharing lessons.
> 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.
The most exciting trends and startups in inclusive finance this year
> Posted by Vikas Raj, Director of Investments, Accion Venture Lab
There has been a lot of buzz in the financial technology (FinTech) space over the last several months, with a high-profile IPO, several more apparently on the way, and more and more venture funding flowing into FinTech startups. Bold ideas for financial services innovation are getting more visibility – just this month, Australian Wealth Index (AWI) listed the 50 Best FinTech Innovators, and CFI’s Elisabeth Rhyne conveniently categorized the list so it’s easy to see at a glance where the innovations are.
At Venture Lab, we found the AWI list interesting but also felt it missed something significant: namely, that one of the biggest opportunities for FinTech is figuring out new solutions to include the billions of lower-income people who are today excluded from formal financial services. And it’s not charity that compels us to reach these customers – it’s good business. These customers represent a big market. In fact, they’re such a significant part of any emerging market’s customer base that any global providers with dreams of international expansion must cater to them if they want to succeed.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
Amidst all the excitement about disruptive fintech innovators it helps to sort out what innovations are actually at play. Australia Wealth Investors, together with KPMG-Australia and Australia’s Financial Services Council, have created a list of the top 50 fintech innovators for 2014, based on a combination of ability to raise capital and subjective judgment about the degree of innovation or disruption the company represents.
I clicked on all 50 (so you don’t have to) to get a sense of where the action really is. Here’s my quick and dirty categorization. It may help to read this to the tune of “The 12 Days of Christmas”, starting with:
> Posted by Alexandra Rizzi, Deputy Director, the Smart Campaign
The Smart Campaign’s just wrapped up its Steering Committee meeting in Switzerland this week. This twice-a-year event is a wonderful opportunity to take stock of the Campaign’s accomplishments, goals, and challenges, and receive feedback from stakeholders who represent the global microfinance market. One of the issues that came up often during this meeting was the opportunity for interaction between the standard-setting work of the Smart Campaign and the policymakers and regulators involved in setting regulatory frameworks for client protection. The need for such interaction is particularly important in countries where client protection regulation for financial services is not yet well developed.
I was also reminded of the importance of a regulatory framework for client protection by news coming out of the U.K. today. The U.K.’s Office of Fair Trading has cracked down on 50 of the biggest providers in the £2 billion pay-day lending market, giving them approximately 12 weeks to improve their practices or be closed. The Office of Fair Trade had been monitoring the payday lending market and found many problems, including:
- Failure to adequately assess the affordability of the loan for customers (see the Client Protection Principle, Avoiding Over-Indebtedness)
- Aggressive debt collections practices and lack of transparency in how repayments are collected (Client Protection Principle on Fair and Respectful Treatment of Clients)
- Advertising that lured customers into loans they could not afford (Client Protection Principle on Transparency)
The Smart Campaign has been developing guidance on good practices in each of these three areas. The Smart Campaign’s perspective is that providers can and should take affirmative responsibility to install responsible practices, and it assists in this process through capacity building, tools, and development of standards of practice. We are proud of our reach to date, resulting in thousands of organizations that are now aware of and actively improving their practices. However we realize that financial markets are complex, that microfinance providers are not the only financial organizations interacting with the poor, and that capacity building and standard setting needs to be complemented by a regulatory framework that creates an orderly marketplace that is safe for clients. The Campaign hopes to explore ways in 2013 that it can interact with regulators to exchange knowledge and viewpoints.
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