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‘Cross-sell Done Well’: How One Finance App Found a Balance Between Digital and Human Touch
Field officers at the Sajida Foundation, a microfinance provider in Bangladesh, knew their clients had rich financial lives, and that some held sizable savings balances to enable their goals. They also knew these clients could earn more by converting their savings to a term deposit account. Yet it was difficult for them to offer complex financial advice, or to answer questions around tiered interest rates and differentiated products. The Foundation worked with BFA to develop an Android-based app to address these issues – Ashirul Amin discusses the lessons learned.
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- Finance, Technology
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This Startup Lets You Use Your Extra Cash To Invest In Community Development
CNote pools individual deposits–as small as $20–and funnels them into Community Development Financial Institutions, which support low-income communities and small businesses.
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- Investing
- Region
- North America
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Can Next-Generation Startups Unite Agritech and Fintech for Farmers in Emerging Markets?
An amalgamation of agritech and fintech solutions could have an incredible impact for the masses, especially populations that work within the agriculture chain. But making these apps and other digital solutions more user-friendly is critical to expanding their usage. Developers may need to borrow the best toolsets from both sectors, writes Sneha Sampath with Unitus Seed Fund.
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- Agriculture, Finance, Technology
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Making a Case for the Business Case: New Ways to Provide Sustainable Financial Services to Low-Income Communities
The high numbers of people who participate in informal savings groups is appealing to financial service providers – there are hundreds of thousands of active groups whose self-selected members save weekly for a year, and share their accumulated savings – but it's not easy to tap into this market commercially. BFA recommends using a business case modeler to help acquire low-income people as customers in a sustainable way.
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- Finance
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Why Low-Income Families Don’t Send Their Children to College. Hint: It’s Not Always About Money.
Household income is not the only limiting factor as to why children of low to upper-low income families do not attend or save for university. Significant behavioral reasons are also involved, and ESCALA, which helps families save for higher education, worked with BFA’s customer insights team to identify and develop a plan to help overcome a few of them.
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How SAJIDA Foundation Nearly Doubled Customer Uptake of Savings Accounts
Astha, a term deposit account, allows SAJIDA Foundation members in Bangladesh to save toward a purchase or financial goal. Through the OPTIX project, BFA conducted data analytics and client research with SAJIDA and eventually redesigned the accounts. After rolling out the new features, the foundation saw a 97 percent increase in accounts opened and 59 percent more mobilization of savings.
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- Finance
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Two-Sided Mobile Platform Creates ‘Network Effect’ to Help Patients, Health Clinics
The private health sector, where a large percentage of people in developing countries seek care, is fragmented and marked by poor quality and high prices. Two interlinked programs conceived by a group in the Netherlands – M-TIBA and the Medical Credit Fund – are attempting to address this problem at large scale. Both have achieved remarkable growth within a short period.
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- Health Care, Technology
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Surviving a Pandemic: How ‘Economic Training’ Helps Families Live Beyond HIV/AIDS
Millions of households are struggling to support children affected by HIV/AIDS. A new approach seeks to ease their burden by integrating economic strengthening activities into programs that already serve orphans and vulnerable children and their extended families. It involves training practitioners with new skill sets, so they in turn can help others develop financial independence and resilience.
- Categories
- Health Care