NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, May 15, 2014

WASHINGTON, May 14, 2014 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — MIX, a leading information provider and thought leader in the microfinance sector, announced today FINclusion Lab, the first data visualization and analysis platform that brings together the elements of financial services activities, markets, and products, including national and sub-national views. The platform, which is currently in beta, streamlines the process of decision making for service providers and policy makers, and marks a significant step forward for the microfinance sector for data capture and analysis.

The Finclusion Lab platform enables users to address the access, quality, and usage of financial services for excluded communities currently in 15 markets by allowing them to create multi-dimensional and cross-country analysis. FINclusion Lab is designed to enable financial inclusion by providing national policy makers and financial service providers (FSPs) a way to measure progress toward development and growth goals and better coordinate with each other in a given market or intervention.

“The FINclusion solution is helping and empowering national stakeholders to identify ways to better measure progress on financial inclusion goals and optimize growth strategies,” explains Lara Storm, Director of Financial Inclusion at MIX. “The FINclusion Lab provides a great amount of value to national policy makers and operators by helping them answer questions regarding gaps in service, the location of providers, and the types of leading providers and channels. They can see how financial inclusion landscapes change over time.”

Zambia is one of the 15 countries currently available on FINclusion Lab, with four more planned for this year. “It’s abundantly clear that MIX has been busy developing tools that respond to the analytical needs of a wide range of financial inclusion stakeholders in Zambia,” says Joseph Munyoro, Senior Financial Analyst of the Central Bank of Zambia. “MIX has succeeded in pulling together all the available financial inclusion data on Zambia and the improved interaction facility makes it quite captivating to explore the data sets.”