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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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Why Alternative Lending Struggles to Scale in Emerging Markets – And What Fintech Companies Can Do About It
Fintech models have proliferated in most developing countries, but alternative lending has struggled to gain scale. That's why FIBR, a project by consulting firm BFA in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation, is bringing together fintechs and banks to use networks of small businesses – shops, clinics and even local schools – to deliver digital financial services to low-income customers.
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- Finance, Technology
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Machine Learning Meets Credit Scoring: How it Can Help Reduce Loan Delinquency Costs
Investment in predictive algorithms for credit scoring is a no-brainer for sophisticated digital financial service providers. Brick-and-mortar financial institutions that are just beginning to explore technology applications should follow suit, according to BFA, because credit scoring optimizes three business layers that improve the overall bottom line.
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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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Microfinance for Refugee Populations: What We’ve Learned and Where to Go Next
Currently, 21.3 million people are registered with United Nations agencies as refugees, and their financial inclusion has become a matter of importance and urgency. The Social Performance Task Force has been working to identify the refugees' needs and recently compiled some guidelines, “Serving Refugee Populations: The Next Financial Inclusion Frontier,” for financial service providers.
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- Finance
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Don’t Just Color It Pink and Call It Financial Inclusion for Women
To close the financial inclusion gender gap, providers will have to do more than simply making cosmetic changes to their existing services. To that end, more than 100 financial regulators and policymakers recently gathered in Fiji and adopted a 10-point proposal focused on creating regulatory and operational environments conducive to bringing financial products and services to women – a possible game-changer for women’s financial inclusion.
- Categories
- Finance, Uncategorized
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What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate: Three Ways to Bridge the Academic/Practitioner Gap
Evidence-based policymaking requires a collaborative relationship between the worlds of research, policy and practice. But productive three-way communication between these actors is difficult, as vague prejudices can limit each side's ability to listen and learn. As every failure to communicate is a missed opportunity, Innovations for Poverty Action explores some ways to improve learning and communication.
- Categories
- Finance, Social Enterprise
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Mapping the Path to Full Financial Inclusion
When attempting to solve a complex development challenge, we often jump from creating ambitious goals to making plans, without first identifying who we need to reach with our goals, where those people reside, and what challenge and opportunities they face. That’s why one of the underappreciated keys to meeting a development goal is to draw a map - and why maps provide the theme for this year's State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report: Mapping Pathways out of Poverty.
- Categories
- Finance