CGAP, Grameen Foundation and MTN Uganda are introducing Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money Incubator, a new initiative that develops mobile financial products for the poor. In this blog post, Project Manager Olga Morawczynski and Operations and Strategy Manager Lisa Kienzle introduce AppLab Money and explain how customer insights will be transformed into viable products offered by [...]

This is the fourth post in a series about product innovation in branchless banking. In the last post we threw the focus on direct observation of consumers to source deep insights that lead to better products. We also released our detailed analysis. Today’s post describes a second key feature of the three Product Labs which [...]

This is the third post in a five-part series about product innovation in branchless banking. Read the first and second posts. This post includes a detailed presentation of CGAP’s analysis of 23 firms from banking, microfinance, mobile, fast moving consumer goods, and Silicon Valley. It also describes the key features of three Product Labs which [...]

This is the second in a five-part series on product innovation in branchless banking. In the first we described how developing products beyond payments is one part of driving scale for providers, and ultimately boosting financial inclusion. Henry Ford famously said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” There’s [...]

This is the first post in a five-part series about product innovation in branchless banking. The promise of branchless banking is increased access to finance for the poor and new revenues for providers of all stripes. That’s not happening yet. CGAP counted 22 branchless banking services with more than 1 million registered users; we also counted [...]