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

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Trends, trends, trends, everywhere. Discussions about the trends underway in the financial inclusion sector dominate workshops and panel debates at all major conferences, as experts peer into crystal balls and extrapolate from what is currently happening in the sector to predict what will change in the years to come.

But too often, this sort of discussion just exists in that moment, for an audience in the room, and then vanishes into the ether. What if there was a more structured way to ask stakeholders what they see as the current and future trends, capture those responses and track them over time?

The inaugural European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP) survey of financial inclusion trends was launched as a response to this question during the summer of 2018. The Financial Inclusion Compass 2018 – the paper that presented the findings from that survey of e-MFP members and other financial inclusion stakeholders – was released during European Microfinance Week (EMW) 2018 last November.