Archive for: Philippines: Globe Telecom

Financial literacy – the level of understanding that customers have when it comes to services - is significant. Danielle Hopkins is with Microfinance Opportunities, a Washington-based group that focuses on financial literacy and other issues facing microfinance. Here are her thoughts.
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For some, El Salvador is famous for some of the best surf spots in Central America. For others it is the kilometer-long black-sanded beaches that come to mind. This week, for the Latin microfinance community, San Salvador will be famous for one of the largest and most reputable microfinance events of the region: The 10th Inter-American Forum on Microenterprise.

Looking at the agenda, the three day conference brings together an amazing group of around 1,500 of the region’s microfinance providers, its networks, governments, donors, and even the royals with the participation of H. M. Queen Sofia of Spain.

CGAP is organizing a panel on technology’s potential to increase outreach and depth of access to finance. Our project partners Visa Credibanco and GXI, as well as Opportunity International will share their lessons learned and challenges to implement technology projects.

Watch this space for more.

That was fun. What did we learn? 

We reaffirmed that small, including micro, enterprises have proven themselves to be reliable and sustainable ways to help people out of poverty and that, in that context, we have abundant proof that microfinance is a workable idea.

MFIs, although having reached increasingly impressive numbers of people, must nonetheless recognize that more than two-thirds of the inhabitants of developing countries remain to be touched by the MFI mission of bringing the advantages of banking to the unbanked and under-banked.

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We’re in the last day of the conference CGAP co-organized with IFC, sponsored by Visa. This morning, three partners of the CGAP technology program are presenting their experiences on using technology to increase access to finance.

Delivery Channels for Microfinance. Banking agents are becoming a popular way of signing up new customers and offering services outside of the branch environment. Can these agents deliver a range of products? How far from the bank branches can this model reach to serve rural areas? Moderator: William Schoch, Vice President, Consumer Products, Visa International.

• Abbas Sikander, Group Executive Director for Operations and Technology, Tameer Bank, Pakistan
• Alex Acosta, Credibanco Visa
• Rizza Maniego-Eala, President, G-Xchange, Inc.

You can watch it live here.

Happy Monday…this Monday is more auspicious than most because it’s the start of our three day conference looking at how technologies such as card-based networks and mobile phones could increase access to finance. IFC is a co-organizer, and Visa is a sponsor.

Want to know more? Visit here for the full agenda.

We’ll be posting presentations as we get them…and this link should take you to a live video stream of the event.

Stefan Staschen works with CGAP’s technology and policy teams. He presented on CGAP’s behalf at the Third African Microfinance Conference in Kampala late in August, and shared with us his impressions of the conference.

Not one or two or three, but four presentations at the AMC in Kampala, Uganda, dealt with the use of technology for increasing access to financial services. Richard Ketley from Genesis Analytics talked about Alternative Service Delivery Mechanisms and the card and phone revolution in Africa. His main conclusion was that African microfinance institutions (MFIs) can leverage existing technology such as mobile phones, ATMs and the internet to counter the negative impact of operating in a high cost environment and more often than not using inefficient business models.

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Banking agents, retail and postal outlets handling banking transactions for financial institutions and mobile operators, are mushrooming all over! It took less than four years to cover almost all of Brazil. Colombian banks established 3,548 service points in just one year. In Peru banks manage more than 2,500 agents. Equity Bank in Kenya is piloting agents in rural areas. Xac Bank in Mongolia is planning to develop an agent channel….

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Sci-fi seer William Gibson said “The future is already here: it’s just unevenly distributed.” If that’s true, then the future of mobile is already happening in places like Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa. And two numbers released this month by Wireless Intelligence tell us why mobile payments and banking is much more likely to happen in poor countries than rich ones.

August saw the world’s three billionth mobile phone connection made. The first billion mobile connections took a dozen years, and the second just two and a half years, with 82 percent of new subscribers coming from developing countries. The third billion: just under two years. The growth of mobile is centered squarely in places like Mumbai, not Munich, Lagos, not London.

Meanwhile, ARPU, or average revenue per user, continues its downward trend, sliding another 12 percent globally. This means mobile operators are earning less per customer. The trend is most pronounced in poorer countries. In Africa, blended ARPU has declined by a quarter from 2005, down to 13.9 Euros, compared to the world average of 22.6. ARPUs look even less enticing if you also factor in churn (percentage of customers lost), which increases customer acquisition costs.

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Full disclosure: I penned this for psdblog! 

Okay, we’re three days into the era of the iPhone. While my first-hand experience playing with one over the weekend was exciting (I’m intrigued but will keep my beat-up Treo 650 for awhile, thanks very much), there’s another nascent development in cell phones that could potentially be a much bigger deal over time: mobile (cell) phone banking and its potential to increase access to financial services for poor people.

At CGAP, we’re partnering with companies like Globe Telecom to explore how poor rural communities might be better served with appropriate, responsible services through mobile phones. As this effort gets underway, we’re also taking a look at how regulators in several countries, including the Philippines, are dealing with mobile phone banking. Here are some highlights from our preliminary assessment of Pakistan’s banking regulations when it comes to so-called branchless banking:

- Several mobile network operators (MNOs) have started developing concrete proposals to offer mobile phone payments and banking directly;

- Improving access to financial services features highly on the agenda of the Government of Pakistan;

- Key regulatory issues that may help “branchless banking” increase access to financial services are (a) allowing the use of agents (such as retail shops) outside bank branches; (b) easing account opening (both on-site and remotely) while maintaining adequate “know your customer” standards; and (c) permitting a range of players to participate in payment service provision and e-money issuance (especially MNOs), enabling innovation from multiple parties.

In addition to Pakistan, CGAP is working on similiar assessments in Brazil, India, Kenya, South Africa, the Philippines, and Russia. So, more to come…