Inclusive Finance Frontiers

The wide reach of digital financial services, such as digital savings, credit, payments, insurance or investment products, can unlock life-changing opportunities for low-income consumers by helping them save, borrow, and receive remittances. But here’s a little secret about the seemingly endless array of these digital services: their current ability to attract and serve new users largely depends on the expansion of old-fashioned physical interaction through agent networks. These networks enable users to deposit or withdraw cash from digital accounts, which is crucial in cash economies where digital finance has limited use cases. Expanding these networks beyond large cities is notoriously difficult, but significant progress has been made in recent years — and in surprising ways. In this episode, we explore the latest advances in agent networks and what they mean for the future of inclusive finance.

#inclusivefinance #financialinclusion #digitalfinance #gendernorms #papuanewguinea

Featured Voices:

· Emilio Hernandez, Senior Financial Sector Specialist, CGAP

· Sasidhar Thumuluri, Managing Director and CEO, Sub-K

· Archana Pandey, General Manager, Financial Inclusion at Bank of Baroda

· Sandhya Rani, Sub-K rural agent

Special thanks to Anand Raman, CGAP consultant based in India, for his help in leading interviews with Sub-K agents and customers.

Central banks have been eying the emergence of privately issued digital currencies with a mix of excitement and anxiety and some began experimenting with their own versions of crypto: central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Advocates say CBDCs offer an alternative to private digital currencies that will enable central banks to retain their control over national monetary supplies, better combat money laundering and fraud, and even advance financial inclusion. But are CBDCs really the game-changer for financial inclusion that many claim? What are the key enablers and constraints to CBDCs advancing financial inclusion? And how are central banks thinking about designing CBDCs to ensure that they achieve their goals?

#digitalcurrencies #CBDC #financialinclusion

Featured Voices:

· Kwame Oppong, Head of Fintech and Innovation, Bank of Ghana

· Mahesh Uttamchandani, Global Practice Manager for the World Bank Group’s Financial Inclusion, Access and Infrastructure between January 2018 and September 2022 and currently the World Bank’s Practice Manager for Digital Development in East Asia and the Pacific

· Nana Yaa Boakye-Adjei, Senior Consultant, the World Bank

· Tanja Hessdörfer, Head of Sales and Business Development CBDC at Giesecke+Devrient

· Mehmet Kerse, Senior Consultant on Digital Finance and Financial Inclusion, CGAP

Typhoon Rai made landfall in the Philippines in December 2021, killing over 400 people, devastating 1.5 million homes, and causing over US$1 billion in damage. Extreme weather events like Rai are becoming more common as a result of climate change. Financial services can make households more resilient and adaptive, but too often the people who are most vulnerable to these shocks—such as women, poor people, forcibly displaced people, and people in rural areas—are also financially excluded. In this episode, we travel to the Philippines to speak with a Typhoon Rai survivor and the insurance provider that helped her rebuild her home, as we explore the changing role of insurance and other financial services in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Listen and subscribe for free on your favorite platform. To learn more, visit www.cgap.org and to share feedback, connect at [email protected].

The spread of digital technology and infrastructure has given rise to fintech, but it’s also driven the popularity of non-financial services like social media apps, gig platforms, and e-commerce sites. The term “embedded finance” refers to the integration of financial tools into this growing array of services. Just as mobile money brought payments closer to low-income customers via their phones, embedded finance has the potential to bring a whole range of financial services even closer. The opportunities this presents to advance financial inclusion are almost endless and may define financial inclusion for years to come. But what forms will embedded finance take? What are the biggest opportunities and risks? And what players are driving it in different regions? In this episode, we take a look at what lies ahead for embedded finance.

Listen and subscribe for free on your favorite platform. To learn more, visit www.cgap.org and to share feedback, connect at [email protected].

What are the frontiers of financial inclusion? Of course, there is a geographical frontier: people in rural areas are more often excluded from the financial system. There’s also a technological frontier: while digital technology has greatly expanded the reach of financial services, those on the other side of the digital divide are being left behind. But there’s also a social frontier, often in the form of social norms that dictate who can – and can’t – access and use financial services. In this episode, we hear from Women’s Micro Bank (also known as Mama Bank), a bank in Papua New Guinea that pushed geographical and technological boundaries in its attempts to expand rural women’s access to banking services but ran into its biggest challenges at the social frontier.

Listen and subscribe for free on your favorite platform. To learn more, visit www.cgap.org and to share feedback, connect at [email protected].

If you’ve ever suspected that privacy policies aren’t really written to help you make informed decisions about how companies use your data, then this episode is for you. Privacy and consumer financial services expert David Medine discusses the risks that millions of low-income consumers face in developing countries as they start using digital financial services. He then describes an approach to taking data protection and privacy beyond the consent form and into the 21st century.

For years, digital financial services providers have tried and failed to seize a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity: the large-scale digitization of retail payments in emerging markets. What must providers do differently to make digital payments work better than cash for merchants and their customers? CGAP Senior Financial Sector Specialist Peter Zetterli’s search for an answer led him to a surprising question: What if trying to be better than cash is the wrong approach?

Background reading:

Digitizing Merchant Payments