Archive for: Access To Finance

CGAP Brief, April 2006
Using Technology to Build Inclusive Financial Systems (pdf)
Innovative use of information and communications technologies to inexpensively process a large
volume of small transactions and deliver a wide range of financial services may help to make
microfinance institutions (MFIs) more efficient and commercial banks more interested in serving
poor people.

Focus Note No. 32, January 2006
Using Technology to Build Inclusive Financial Systems
Some of the innovations commercial banks need to service poor clients may be found in information and communications technologies (ICTs).This Focus Note addresses the following questions: Can banking technologies, applied innovatively in developing countries, make microfinance profitable for formal financial institutions? Will they reduce costs to such an extent that banks could profitably serve even those whom MFIs have mostly excluded to date, such as very poor and remote rural customers? Will these customers be comfortable using technology?

English pdf | French pdf | Spanish pdf | Russian pdf | Arabic pdf

September 2004
Breaking Down the Walls between Microfinance and the Formal Financial System
(adapted from Elizabeth Littlefield and Richard Rosenberg, “Microfinance and the Poor: Breaking Down the Walls between Microfinance and Formal Finance,” Finance & Development 41, no. 2 (June 2004): 38-40)
There is a dawning understanding that developing countries’ financial systems need to be more accessible to poor people and that there are practical ways to make this happen. All kinds of financial institutions–regulators, mainstream rating agencies, commercial and state banks, insurance companies, and credit bureaus–are starting to play a part in developing sound, inclusive financial systems that serve the majority of poor countries citizens.

English pdf | French pdf | Spanish pdf | Russian pdf | Arabic pdf