Archive for: December, 2007

Reaching poor clients with financial services in rural areas is often prohibitively expensive for financial institutions since low transaction numbers and volumes typically would not cover the cost of a branch. To overcome that challenge, financial institutions in developing markets are increasingly turning to banking agents, using retail outlets to process financial transactions that would usually be handled by a branch teller.  Lower set-up and running costs of banking agents should enable providers to viably offer a full range of financial services to low-income clients in rural and remote areas.

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CNN.com takes on the topic of mobile money transfers - remittances - and their potential to reduce poverty. But what about a broader spectrum of financial services - eventually, couldn’t that have even more impact? CGAP’s Mark Pickens tells CNN.com:

Mobile-based financial services “could lead to a fundamental shift in what we’re calling the ‘access frontier’ for low-income people looking to get banking services,” says Pickens. This would allow them to “manage their affairs better and put a safety net under their family, maybe build assets for the future, and possibly even start new businesses and grow their income.”

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Vodafone India Unveils Cost Cuts, IBM Deal
Vodafone has already taken a number of initiatives to grow in India, which has a population three times the size of Europe. In May, Vodafone launched two sub-$45 handsets, working with China’s ZTE Corp. (0763.HK), in a bid to make mobile phones more affordable to millions of Indians on low incomes.

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Burried in the Economist’s recent article on “The frontier of finance” was the little number that M-PESA is about to hit 1 million users signed up for its mobile payments service in Kenya. So what: mobile banking is gathering steam. That’s old news.

But lost in all the buzz is the critical role third-party agents serve in the play for millions of low-income clients. A broad range of corner stores, petrol stations, lottery kiosks, post offices and other outlets feature prominently in the system architecture for such success stories as Safaricom’s M-PESA in Kenya, as well as in other countries, such as Globe Telecom’s GCash service in the Philippines.

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Brazil’s ACSP Launches Global FICO Consumer Credit Scores
Fair Isaac and Associacao Comercial de Sao Paulo (ACSP), one of the largest credit bureaus in Brazil, have announced ACSP’s launch of Global FICO Score for Brazilian businesses - saying that “the launch of this innovative consumer credit-risk score makes Brazil the first South American nation to access Fair Isaac’s global-standard FICO credit risk scoring technology.”

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