People working on social protection policy and financial inclusion don’t always find a lot of common ground. In fact, some would say they put out competing views of poverty alleviation: direct payments from the government to raise incomes, or increasing poor people’s access to financial services to help weather shocks and increase incomes. Of course, this is an over-simplification, and somewhat artificial. Both want the same end (poverty alleviation) and neither casts itself as the magic bullet. There’s a good 20+ years of thinking on how social protection and financial inclusion are mutually reinforcing, including somewhat famously the idea of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) as created by Michael Sherraden.

There’s a new surge of interest, this time looking at how the impact of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) can be magnified by providing recipients with basic financial services.

I recently participated in a panel on the topic organized by The New America Foundation’s Jamie Zimmerman, who along with Yves Moury, have authored a paper on the topic. Here’s the video.

My take? If linking the poor to financial services helps them, why stop at CCTs? Let’s look at a wider world of government-to-person (G2P) payments, including other types of social welfare payments as well as wages and pensions. By CGAP’s estimate, more than 155 million of the world’s poor receive a regular payment from their government. But far less than 1/4 land in an account.

Those of us working on the financial inclusion need to line up the evidence to convince social policymakers that bolting on basic bank accounts for recipients will have benefits. And crucially, we need to boost the business case for banks to provide basic banking to poor G2P recipients on a profitable basis. One key will be deploying on more cost-effective delivery channels — such as point of sale terminals at existing merchants in the community rather than expensive bank branches.