Archive for: May, 2007

We’re at a banking conference in Sao Paulo, where I had a chance to present on agents and our work in Colombia. In terms of using banking agents to reach remote areas and poor clients, the Brazilian financial system represents probably the future of many Latin American markets. Whereas countries like Colombia are just starting to develop such outlets, in Brazil they already make up 56% of all financial system points of sale are, reaching all municipalities.

Since our last visit in June 2006, the atmosphere has changed a lot. Whereas last year, banks were still experimenting with different approaches and were not yet convinced that banking agents were viable, today everybody we asked during our last week in Sao Paulo, considered banking agents a profitable channel. Banking agents move clients which are high cost for the bank (small ticket size, often only limited usage of products) to the low-cost agent channel, and free space in branches for clients which generate more revenue for the bank. Before branches were full of people just paying their bills. Read the rest of this page »

Here’s the Powerpoint of my presentation at a roundtable with regulators and people from the banking and telecom sectors in Karachi, Pakistan. It was a half-day event, attended by the Governor of the State Bank. CGAP’s Steve Rasmussen moderated. Stefan Staschen and I made two presentations to jumpstart discussions around the morning’s topics of (a) international experience with branchless banking, and (b) observations from CGAP’s Pakistan diagnostic.