Searching: Research & Analysis

Climate Risk and Financial Inclusion: A Regulatory Perspective

Climate change risks may drive the financial sector away from serving the least profitable and most climate-exposed clients. This working paper outlines how inclusive green finance policies can help reduce these risks, creating a more stable and resilient real economy.

Putting Gig Data to Work: Innovations in Expanding Credit Access

Learn how industry pioneers such as Moove and Karmalife have developed algorithms and products to use work and earnings data to extend credit to gig workers in this new brief.

Financial Services for Gig Workers: Lessons on Getting Design and Delivery Right

This brief highlights four examples of successful design and delivery methods employed by industry leaders in providing financial services to gig workers.

The Setup: Partnerships and Conditions for Offering Financial Services to Gig Workers

Platforms can offer financial services to underserved gig workers through digital channels, but it's essential to have the right environment for payments, regulations, and analysis. In this brief, early lessons share how institutional partnerships can lead to successful market entry.

Bolstering Women’s Climate Resilience and Adaptation through Financial Services

Financial services help people to reduce the impact of and to adapt to climate-related risks. Yet women have less access to such tools. This working paper illustrates how women are differently impacted by climate change and how financial services can play a better role in strengthening their autonomous adaptive capacities to climate change.

Instant Payments and Merchants — Pricing Policy Considerations

This technical note helps explain why changes in instant payment pricing are occurring, assesses their impact on market development, and offers suggestions for the path forward.

Starting the Transaction: Payment Initiation and Customer Experience

This technical note is framed to help policymakers and payment system operators understand recent trends in payment initiation and customer experience in making interoperable payments work better for low-income populations.

Business Intelligence: A Bedrock of Successful Digitization in Microfinance

Microfinance institutions that successfully generate value for their business and customers through digitization anchor these efforts in business intelligence. This Technical Note outlines an approach for improving business intelligence with interventions that require minimum or no investment in technology. CGAP also offers a customer dashboard library with detailed instructions for data teams and a tutorial video.

Emerging Trends in National Financial Inclusion Strategies that Support Women’s Entrepreneurship

Women entrepreneurs continue to face persistent gender-based barriers that impede their success – such as unequal access to financial accounts, constrained credit, and normative roles that keep women in the role of primary caregivers. Improved financial inclusion can help reduce some of these barriers. This WBL-CGAP Brief presents data collected by the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project on how National Financial Inclusion Strategies can spur policy and regulatory reforms in support of women’s entrepreneurship. 

Igniting SDG Progress Through Digital Financial Inclusion (2023 edition)

Building on the success of the first edition in 2018, the 2023 edition of Igniting SDG Progress Through Digital Financial Inclusion looks at evidence-based examples for the 13 global goals relevant to digital financial inclusion. This work is a collaboration between the Office of United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development (UNSGSA Queen Máxima), Better Than Cash Alliance, the United Nations Capital Development Fund, CGAP and the World Bank.