This is the third post in a series on remittances. Stefan Staschen works regularly as a consultant for CGAP’s Government and Policy Team and is an Associate with Bankable Frontier Associates. 

Tajik migrants, courtesy of Stefan Staschen

My colleague Olga Tomilova and I recently were in Tajikistan and Russia to learn more about the large remittance flows between these two countries. We were most interested in the potential to link remittances with other financial products, such as loans and savings accounts in order to increase access to finance on both ends of the remittance corridor.

Having lived and worked in Kenya for many years, I inevitably started comparing Tajikistan with Kenya, and I realized that this is actually quite an interesting comparison.

For example, taking one point of comparison, in Kenya there is a lot of talk about the high aid-dependence of the economy (5.7% of GDP). But it turns out that it is still small in comparison to the “remittance-dependence” of Tajikistan, which peaked at 50% of GDP in 2008 (i.e. just before the effects of ...

Photo courtesy of SEWA

This is the final post in a four-part series on branchless banking in India. The earlier blogs on MicroSave’s review of e/m-banking and the innovative service providers Beam and Eko demonstrated the power of convenience and simplicity. In keeping with this optimistic view of a still uncertain India venture, we conclude with three more positive items to highlight. Two reflect new changes by the government and one goes back to the fundamentals.

1. The Government of India has established a clearer vision for electronic payments and agents and aims to make a substantial investment to expand these capabilities across India.

The Government of India recently released a task force report on a unified payments infrastructure linked to the biometric Aadhaar number. While many questions remain, this report establishes important policy points. It recognizes the value of electronic payments to both cut costs for the government and bring convenience to the end recipients. It also sees G2P as a major flow of capital which can prime the pump, while recognizing that much more ought to flow over branchless banking channels. ...

CGAP and Dalberg Global Development Advisors recently conducted a landscaping study of international remittances through mobile money. Download the report to read details of the industry landscape in 2012, emerging success factors, challenges and innovations as well as seven case studies. This blog post is the first in a five part series examining international remittances and branchless banking. Andria Thomas is Project Manager at Dalberg.

Since remittances to developing countries were estimated at about $351 billion for 2011, capturing even a small share of this market could be a transformational opportunity for mobile money providers – right?

Perhaps, but it’s not as easy as one might think. Building on our landscaping study of international remittances through branchless banking conducted at the end of 2010, we set out to analyze the growing industry of international remittances through mobile money as it continues to evolve today. We paid particular attention to offerings that allow a customer to receive funds from abroad directly into a mobile wallet which can be converted to cash at a large agent network. We wanted to understand whether international remittances are helping build the mobile money business. Can international remittances be ...

CGAP, Grameen Foundation and MTN Uganda are introducing Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money Incubator, a new initiative that develops mobile financial products for the poor. In this blog post, Project Manager Olga Morawczynski and Operations and Strategy Manager Lisa Kienzle introduce AppLab Money and explain how customer insights will be transformed into viable products offered by MTN Uganda. This is the final post in a series about product innovation in branchless banking.

Courtesy of AppLab

If we want to move the mobile financial services sector beyond payments and create products that reach every level of society, we have to be creative. The industry requires product innovation that focuses on customer desires, use patterns, and needs, and then translates these findings into viable products. In Uganda, Grameen Foundation’s AppLab is partnering with MTN and CGAP to do this by launching a product incubator: AppLab Money.

At AppLab Money, we will dedicate 100% of our time and resources to researching, prototyping and testing innovative products in line with AppLab’s approach to sustainable product development. Our agreement with MTN Uganda enables us to ...

Chris Bold spent two years on secondment from DFID to CGAP where he worked on G2P-related issues, among other things. He has since returned to DFID where he is an Adviser on Private Sector Development in Fragile Countries. This is the second blog in a series on G2P and financial inclusion, based on CGAP’s new Focus Note Social Cash Transfers and Financial Inclusion: Evidence from Four Countries. Read the first post here.

Our recently released Focus Note on Social Cash Transfers and Financial Inclusion looks at the evidence from four large and well established programs in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and South Africa to attempt to answer three broad questions that are relevant to different stakeholder groups:

For governments: Is building inclusive financial services into social cash transfer programs affordable for the social programs? For recipients: Will poor recipients use financial services if these are offered to them? For providers: Can financial institutions offer financially inclusive services to G2P payment recipients on a profitable basis?

In the first post, Sarah Rotman looked at the costs to government. Today, I am going to expand on what we found about the recipient experience of receiving payments electronically and into “mainstream financial ...

This is the fourth post in a series about product innovation in branchless banking. In the last post we threw the focus on direct observation of consumers to source deep insights that lead to better products. We also released our detailed analysis. Today’s post describes a second key feature of the three Product Labs which will be established by CGAP’s bank, telco and other partners.

Let’s say you are a manager who has bought into developing products beyond the standard liquid wallet and P2P functionality ubiquitous in branchless banking. You want to innovate. Then you run smack into the existing biases, procedures, and requirements of your own company.

If you are not careful, your good ideas will die a slow death of endless internal analysis or be outright rejected because “the data’s just not there”. As one manager told us about his company, “This place is run by accountants. If you don’t have the data, you go nowhere.” How can you feed the beast and move forward rapidly to approval?

This is the question confronting senior managers CGAP interviewed at more than a dozen firms that ...

Recently, the CGAP Microfinance Blog hosted a series on the role that public funders can play to promote branchless banking. The series was launched in conjunction with a new CGAP Focus Note that highlights emerging lessons from public funders in this space. Regular readers of this blog are very familiar with the excitement around branchless banking and are probably aware that branchless banking is primarily being driven by the private sector. In fact, private investors have provided about 80% of the estimated $400 million in debt/equity investment in the sector. However, public funders are eager to use their resources to help bring branchless banking to more and more countries. Given the current momentum, is there a meaningful role that public funders can play without crowding out private investment?

The new Focus Note and series attempt to answer this question. We spoke with public funders that have already been active in this space and developed case studies to understand what role they played and why. We found that public funders can play an important and additive role in developing branchless banking services. However, they should ensure that their involvement includes one or more of ...

This is the first post in a five-part series about product innovation in branchless banking.

The promise of branchless banking is increased access to finance for the poor and new revenues for providers of all stripes. That’s not happening yet.

CGAP counted 22 branchless banking services with more than 1 million registered users; we also counted more than 70 others which have not reached that threshold (as of Q1 2011). That’s about a 1 in 4 “hit rate”. If we look at services which have launched since 2007 (i.e. since M-PESA got everyone excited) and acquired more than 250,000 active users (a better indicator of traction in the market than registrations), success rate drops to 1 in 15. Not so hot.

This might just be the growing pains of firms still figuring out how to operate in this new space at the intersect of several industries (mobile, banking). Some providers have fallen into regulatory ruts, some are finding it hard to build robust agent networks, while still others are struggling to make technology platforms stable (often wrestling with vendors who provided them in the first place). In short, there is a ...

As regular readers of this blog will know, we  are excited about the developments that we’re seeing in branchless banking in Pakistan, which have led us to call it a “laboratory” for innovation. Most recently I interviewed Mansoor Hassan Siddiqui, the Director for Banking Policy and Regulations at the State Bank of Pakistan about the recent changes to the Branchless Banking Regulations that, among other things, removed the need to capture biometric information at the time of account opening.

These changes to the regulation seem to have unleashed yet more activity. Easypaisa, the longest-established service in the market launched by Tameer Microfinance Bank and their parent company, mobile network operator Telenor, now claims over half a million mobile accounts following a major campaign. The mobile account will complement their over-the-counter bill payment and domestic money transfer services which together have processed a total of Rs 43 billion (US$500 million).

The other major player in the market is UBL, which launched their Omni service in April last year, only six months after easypaisa’s debut. UBL is supporting a number of government and NGO programs in the distribution of cash transfers to nearly two million beneficiaries through their ...

Chrissy Martin is currently a Senior Consultant at MEDA. Previously, she worked for 12 months as the Product Manager for Digicel in Haiti, which has rolled out a mobile money service called TchoTcho Mobile. Through both Digicel and MEDA, Chrissy has worked with several NGOs that are interested in mobile money services to make payments to beneficiaries of cash-for-work programs. She outlines some of practical challenges that have to be overcome to make this a reality.

Mobile Money in Haiti

There are many reasons to be excited about mobile phones as a way to distribute cash transfers, such as government payments or NGO cash-for-work programs. First, cash transfers are often sent to groups of people in multiple locations, and it can be easier to reach them via mobile than to bring them together in one place. It is also easier to track payments if they are sent electronically, which can reduce corruption and increase confidence that the right amount of money ends up with the right individuals. A third possible benefit is that relying on a network of mobile money agents who already handle cash will ...