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> Posted by Michael Miebach, President, Middle East and Africa, MasterCard
FI2020 Week is a global conversation on the key actions needed to advance financial inclusion, grounded in the findings of the recently launched FI2020 Progress Report. From November 2-6, 2015, stakeholders around the world are participating in more than 30 events and sharing their voices over social media, with #FI2020.
FI2020 Week offers a good opportunity to review the findings in the FI2020 Progress Report and to consider actions the global community needs to take to advance financial inclusion. This is of particular interest to me as I work every day to expand MasterCard’s payments platform in the Middle East and Africa, and in a volunteer capacity, I also serve on the board of directors of Accion.
The report asserts that it’s not enough to “build the rails” to enable payment and transaction access, but that “providers, regulators and support institutions need to ensure that the financial services that follow provide value and quality to the passengers who climb aboard.” Here is where interoperability is essential—if last mile customers are to benefit. Banks, telcos, merchants, and governments must be connected—despite different rules and technologies—in a way that is seamless to the user. From a customer perspective, that means ubiquity, safety, and utility—the trifecta of success in financial inclusion. It won’t work if all the stakeholders are competing to create their own end-to-end solutions, or operating in silos. It won’t work if we are creating islands, where the unbanked transact with each other and where data is used in proprietary ways to support individual business models, rather than being shared as a public good.
Now, a parent in Zimbabwe sends money to his daughter studying at university in South Africa using a mobile money operator connected to the global banking system. All he needs to do is go to an EcoCash agent and top up his mobile money account. His daughter then accesses the funds using a MasterCard debit card linked to the same EcoCash mobile money account to purchase text books, and pay university fees as well as other day-to-day expenses while at university in South Africa. This is ubiquity, safety, and utility put into action.
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> Posted by Center Staff
This week, The Guardian Global Development Professionals Network launched its Financial Inclusion hub, featuring stories, infographics, videos, and other resources on financial inclusion issues worldwide. The hub will be updated regularly over the coming months with original content. The first collection of posts includes:
- Using mobile money to buy water and solar power in East Africa
- Funeral insurance in South Africa: counting the cost of life and death
- Zimbabwe’s Econet Wireless and the making of Africa’s first cashless society
- An interactive map on ATMs worldwide
Guardian Professional Network hubs are community-focused sites, where The Guardian brings together advice, best practice, and insight from a range of professional communities. With this week’s launch, financial inclusion is sharing the stage among global development issues such as climate change, global health and nutrition, and urbanization, with the goal of promoting understanding, dialogue, and debate among those working in global development. CFI is a knowledge partner with The Guardian for the Financial Inclusion hub, sharing story and topic ideas and facilitating connections with editors.
Visit the hub at www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/financial-inclusion. You can join the conversation on Twitter using #NOunbanked
Have some ideas for issues and stories that should be investigated as part of the hub? Let us know in the comments.
> Posted by Juan Blanco, Associate, Financial Inclusion 2020, CFI
Mobile money services have spread like wildfire, making people less cash-reliant and able to easily carry out transactions like bill payments and money transfers. GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked program identified 14 mobile money sprinters – leaders of some of the fastest growing mobile deployments in the world. Among these, three case studies from mobile money services in Pakistan, Somaliland, and Zimbabwe have been published. The case studies highlight the reasons why these particular schemes have achieved significant customer bases and transactions volumes since their deployments.
Easypaisa (Pakistan). After only 11 months, Easypaisa registered 5 million transactions and by the end of 2012 it had 100 million transactions with a volume of $US 1.4 billion. Easypaisa was created in late 2009 by the MNO Telenor Pakistan and Tameer Bank, after Telenor acquired a 51 percent stake in Tameer. Telenor acknowledged that launching a mobile wallet product wouldn’t be the ideal way to set up Easypaisa since they only had a 22 percent market share and so the product wouldn’t encompass 40 million non-Telenor customers. Furthermore, regulations in the country called for very comprehensive Know-Your-Customer (KYC) procedures, creating the additional obstacles of increased registration cost and time.
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