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The Power of Trust in Digital Finance: How to Leverage Trusted Technology to Maximize Inclusion and Impact
Trust can be a significant barrier to engagement in digital financial services among low-income users. According to William Derban at Opportunity International, that means providers must often take measures to address this trust deficit when developing digital services that target these customers — particularly women. He discusses Opportunity International's new Trusted Tech Microfinance Initiative, and shares six ways the initiative is working to build clients’ trust in the technologies Opportunity and its microfinance partners are using.
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- Finance, Technology, Telecommunications
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Can Access to Smartphones Bridge the Digital Divide in Sub-Saharan Africa?
Research shows that mobile phones can be a useful tool in the fight against poverty, increasing both household income and consumption. But according to Amani M’Bale at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Graham A.N. Wright at MicroSave (MSC), to reach that potential, it’s important that these phones are able to bridge the digital divide, becoming accessible to, and used by, the underserved people they can benefit the most. They share several factors that can increase — or limit — the usage of smartphones and other mobile devices in sub-Saharan Africa.
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- Finance, Telecommunications
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Augmented Reality for Financial Literacy: An Innovative Approach to Delivering Immersive Customer Education
India's Business Correspondents – i.e., retail agents engaged by banks to provide financial services at locations other than a bank branch – often struggle to learn about the new products and services their banks offer. And though online training has become the new normal during the pandemic, many of these agents find it difficult to complete. Piyush Singh and Rahul Ranjan Sinha at Grameen Foundation India discuss the value of augmented reality in addressing this challenge – and in enhancing online financial education more broadly for underserved customers.
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- Education, Finance, Technology
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To Tax or Not to Tax Mobile Money: The Impact on Digital Financial Services in Africa and Beyond
Mobile money is widely seen as a promising engine for global development. But governments in Africa are also increasingly viewing it as a lucrative source of tax revenue. With critics raising concerns about the impact of taxing mobile money and other digital financial services, Adrienne Lees and Phil Mader at the Institute of Development Studies explore whether existing research can inform any confident predictions about the effects of these taxes on providers, customers and the broader financial inclusion sector.
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- Finance, Telecommunications
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Press Release: Mastercard Strive Community Awards $1 Million to Digital and Data-First Projects to Strengthen Small Businesses
Strive Community has awarded enterprises developing innovative, scalable solutions to strengthen small businesses’ digital capabilities, through its Innovation Fund.
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- Technology
- Region
- Global
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How Wave Rose to Become Francophone Africa’s First Unicorn
The digital financial company erased the old ways of sending and receiving money and came up with an easier and cheaper method.
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- Finance, Telecommunications
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The Leapfrog Opportunity in ‘Know Your Customer’ Innovation: Why Africa Needs Local, Digitized KYC Solutions
Know Your Customer (KYC) is a critical process for banks, as it enables them to validate their customers’ identities to fulfill regulatory requirements and protect against fraud. But as Timbo Drayson at OkHi explains, KYC is a big and expensive problem in Africa: For instance, in Nigeria some banks are spending up to $1 million per year to manually verify identities, and 15-30% of customers never complete these processes. He explores three key challenges to KYC in Africa, and presents some tech-driven solutions that could allow the continent to leapfrog to a new global best practice for KYC.
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- Finance, Technology
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Resolving the Core Tension of Impact-Focused Fintech: A Viable Model for Reaching Rural Women with Digital Financial Services
Reaching last-mile communities is challenging for a business that also has to attend to its own bottom line. Claudia Sosa Lazo at IDEO.org discusses a partnership between IDEO.org, BRAC, bKash and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics that is seeking profitable ways to bring digital financial services to rural women in Bangladesh. She explains how the partnership provides a model for other businesses and NGOs that hope to unlock both profit and social impact, while bringing beneficial products to the world’s most excluded communities.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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