Recent Blogs
Has the Microfinance Market Come of Age?
Compartamos and SKS. What do these two have in common? Where do they differ? What lessons, if any, can we draw from studying these first two, historic events?
How Branchless Banking Can Foster Savings Accounts for the Poor
How can government and private sector most affect the uptake and usage of branchless banking among the unserved majority by 2020?
Getting Back to Governance
A lack of good corporate governance lies at the heart of some of the recent failures in microfinance.
Mobile Banking for Those with No Mobile
Safaricom’s M-Pesa is now so well known in the mobile banking world that it has come to be accepted by some as a blueprint for mobile financial services. The service relies on the phone in the hands of the customer (now more than 12 million) to perform transactions and the phone in the hands of the agent (all 20,000 of them) to credit and debit accounts.
Was SKS Ready for the IPO?
With an already nervous RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and Ministry of Finance wary of the path being charted out by the Indian MFIs and now SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India), the market regulator asking SKS unpleasant questions, it’s perhaps a time to pause and introspect.
Microinsurance Momentum in the Philippines
Over a hundred practitioners gathered in Manila on Friday, October 1 for a consultation on the new “Roadmap for Financial Literacy on Microinsurance,” an action plan prepared by a Technical Working Group comprised of all the key stakeholders from government, the microfinance and cooperative sectors and the insurance industry.
Is SKS Any Different from Wal-Mart?
We may prefer co-operative banks, which don’t make a lot of money for any one individual but do provide safe and accessible savings products to poor people. In spite of some notable exceptions, however, that’s not the dominant paradigm.
Count Them…4 Mobile Money Services Now Live in Tanzania
TigoPesa, created by Tanzania’s fastest-growing mobile network operator, Tigo, is the fourth mobile money service offered in Tanzania. Vodacom Tanzania, a subsidiary of the Vodafone Group, is the leading mobile network operator with a 37% market share.
Microfinance Impact: Are We Asking the Right Questions?
There’s plenty of appetite to further this discussion so that we can learn more about the value that different types of research approaches can bring to answering some fundamental questions.
Highlights from the CGAP Technology Blog – September 2010
We started out September with a virtual conference on the topic of a new CGAP Focus Note Microfinance & Mobile Banking: The Story So Far. We invited guest bloggers from the MFIs featured in the paper to share their learnings from implementing mobile banking in their daily operations. Here SMEP consultant George Kinyanjui explains how group dynamics have changed with the use of M-PESA.
6 Questions for SKS
The Indian microfinance institution, SKS, became the second pure MFI globally to go public by listing its shares on the stock market. SKS is one of the largest microfinance institutions in the world with almost 6 million clients, mostly poor women living in rural areas.
Mobile Money Innovation… Waiting… Waiting…
To some extent, falling hardware prices and mobile data transfer costs make it inevitable that we will see suddenly cheap technology applied to old problems. But isn’t there more we could be doing?
How Should Donors Support Microfinance in Pakistan Post-Flood?
The floods have hit Pakistan hard. Over 2 million homes have been damaged or destroyed, and $1 billion is at risk of being lost by the financial sector in the region most affected.
Social Performance and Financial Performance: Who’s Pulling Who?
The Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) has released a new brief, Microfinance Synergies and Trade-Offs: Social versus Financial Performance Outcomes in 2008.
Enabling International Remittance Services in Georgia
International remittances play an important role in the lives of people across the world, but in Georgia they are of major economic importance, accounting for 9% of the country’s GDP.
Financial Access 2010 Launch
Financial Access 2010 is based on data from financial regulators in 142 countries and provides the first ever framework for global comparisons on financial inclusion.
Pakistan Floods —Branchless Banking Responds
CGAP’s partner in Pakistan, Tameer Microfinance Bank, and their parent company, Telenor Pakistan, have made it possible for people in Pakistan who may not have internet access to make donations to relief organizations using their EasyPaisa mobile banking platform and have removed the usual transfer fees.
Can Mobile Money Be Profitable? We Asked Mobile Money Managers
We surveyed over 20 senior managers from some of the major mobile network operators in over 15 markets. 64 percent of the respondents launched mobile money in the past year. 70 percent claim to already reach over half-a-million customers each with transfers or bill payments or both.
Priorities for Branchless Banking (Part 3 of 3)
Branchless banking is best conceived of as the construction of a network utility. In the third of three blog posts we’ve featured this week, Ignacio emphasizes the applications of this utility for poorer customers.