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Borrowing and Saving – Not Two Sides of the Same Coin
From a mathematical point of view, borrowing and saving are mirror images. In both cases many small payments allow for one or more large payouts. Only the sequence differs. But after traveling to India and Kenya as part of a research project, we were struck by vast differences in the way people make borrowing and savings decisions - and these have profound implications for financial service providers.
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- Uncategorized
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How to Help Low-Income People Save for Retirement: Make it Personal
Can personalized information about their pension payouts help lower-income individuals boost the size of their pensions? To find out, Innovations for Poverty Action placed eight publicly accessible computer modules in Chilean government offices, offering information on individuals' retirement savings from the national database. Here's what they found.
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- Investing
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Mobile wallet Mobikwik’s cash-back scheme runs afoul of Indian regulators
Mobile wallets company Mobikwik has withdrawn a scheme where it offered a “6% annual profit” to customers who maintain a monthly balance of at least Rs.5,000 in their mobile wallets.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Turning the Microfinance Model Upside Down: An Interview with Jeffrey Ashe
In this frank interview, microfinance pioneer-turned-savings group advocate Jeffrey Ashe discusses the history of the savings group model, how it improves upon microfinance – and why it doesn't get as much attention.
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- Finance
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When People Say They ‘Lack the Money to be Banked’ – Here’s What They Mean
Between 2014-2015, Bankable Frontier Associates worked with other partners to collect baseline data on access to financial services in three member countries: Fiji, Samoa and the Solomon Islands. In these surveys, not having enough money also emerged, unsurprisingly, as the number one reason for not having a bank account among unbanked Pacific Islanders. But here's what we found when we dug a bit deeper.
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- Uncategorized
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NextBillion’s Most Popular and Most Shared Posts in the 4th Quarter of 2015
Our most-viewed and most-shared blog posts from the months of October, November and December explored the history and future of impact assessment, a randomized control trial around financial inclusion in Afghanistan and technology solutions for mitigating the youth jobs shortage.
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- Education, Health Care, Impact Assessment, Investing
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IFC Invests in Postal Savings Bank of China to Promote Financial Inclusion for Underserved
The FINANCIAL -- IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, on December 10 announced an investment in Postal Savings Bank of China (PSBC). The investment will help promote access to finance in a country, which according to World Bank Group data, is home to 12% of the world’s unbanked, some 235 million people, many of whom live in rural areas.
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- Investing
- Region
- South Asia
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Mobile-izing Savings with Defaults in Afghanistan
The number of people with phones is far higher than the number of people who have easy access to traditional bank branches, especially among the rural poor. Until now, however, no one has tested whether mobile banking can facilitate default savings programs. This is exactly what a team led by Innovations for Poverty Action set out to do in Afghanistan.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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