This is a guest blog by Mireya Almazán & Ignacio Mas from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

A couple of months ago, we launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative, Showcasing Successes in Banking Beyond Branches, and blogged about it here. We’re pleased to report that success stories are out there and 3 institutions have claimed success under the showcase criteria: Safaricom, Banco de Crédito del Perú (BCP), and Banco Wal-Mart (BWM). Safaricom and BCP lead the way in the Bridges to Cash showcase, and BWM carries the torch for the Digital Piggy Bank showcase. Successful showcase entries were announced at the World Economic Forum Africa Summit in Cape Town this week, and you can read about them on the foundation’s website.

As a reminder, the Bridges to Cash showcase recognizes players who have built a dense and sustainable network of cash merchants where people cash-in and cash-out conveniently from their electronic accounts. Under the showcase criteria, this is defined by a volume of transactions at cash merchants of at least 30 per day, and a network of cash merchants with at least 10 times the number of bank branches of the largest bank in the country where it operates. The Digital Piggy Bank showcase recognizes players that can demonstrate their electronic accounts are being used as a store of value, with at least 100,000 customers with a non-zero balance in their electronic accounts, and an average balance of at least 20 USD.

Read the rest of this page »

This is a guest blog by Mireya Almazán & Ignacio Mas from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The GSMA Mobile Money for the Unbanked also recently posted a blog from Mireya and Ignacio about their new initiative discussed here.

Who would have expected only three years ago that banking beyond branches would be receiving so much attention across the financial services and development industries? New deployments are popping up globally—over 30 were launched last year alone. While this level of attention and pace of activity is very welcome, keeping track of them all and identifying the promising ones is getting difficult. Part of our job at the Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is to promote industry leaders and spread good practices. Rather than falling into the trap of only talking about those that we know about, or those that are getting the most press, we thought we’d be explicit about what is our vision of success, and have you tell us whether you are already there. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to showcase you.

What’s particularly exciting for us is to see so many different approaches being employed, leveraging partnerships between a wide range of players. While mobile network operators have introduced mobile money services that are proving to be game-changing for financial services in many countries, banks are also taking bold steps to redefine themselves, introducing new business models that can work for poor people at scale. Increasingly, we are seeing banks move away from traditional float- and credit-based revenue models to transaction-based schemes that are more appropriate for the cash flows of poor people. Moreover, banks are shifting the bulk of low-value transactions to a much lower-cost and more ubiquitous retail channel, which adds much convenience to customers and makes for a significantly more compelling business case to serve poor people with savings services. Banking beyond branches will not just involve competition between institutions, but also competition between partnership and business models.

Read the rest of this page »