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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 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 Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
The flagship mobile money service M-Pesa launched in India last month. The service, which started in Kenya in 2007 and has since expanded to eight countries and 17 million users, will be conducted in India by way of a partnership between Vodafone, India’s second largest mobile network operator, and ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank. India’s unbanked population towers at roughly 700 million.
M-Pesa will roll-out in India in phases, beginning with a first effort in the eastern areas of the country. Across Kolkata, West Bengal, Bihar, and Jharkhand, this initial phase boasts a network of 8,300 agents. M-Pesa in India will include cash deposits and withdrawals, money transfers to any mobile device in the country, airtime top-ups, bill payment services, and the ability to make purchases at select stores. With an initial agent network in the thousands and an unbanked population making up the better part of a billion, the ambitions and scope of M-Pesa in India are indeed large. But before we start mentally converting chunks of India’s 700 million unbanked individuals to banked, let’s take a closer look at a few factors that will affect the service’s success.
Mobile Phone Penetration. India has the second largest mobile phone base in the world with over 900 million users. Though as the average Indian user has 2.2 SIM cards, the number of individual subscribers is actually about 319 million – a population penetration of about 25 percent, and rising quickly. However, subscriptions to M-Pesa are limited to clients of Vodafone. Although Vodafone is the second largest mobile network operator in India, it holds only 17 percent of the market. In comparison, Vodafone in Kenya services about 70 percent of the country’s mobile subscribers, and that market dominance is thought to be one of the major success factors, because it allows most cell phone users to connect with most other users.
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