This is a guest blog written by Aya Silva, the Asia Regional Senior Program Officer for Grameen Foundation.

When the GSMA mWomen Working Group met in Manila in November, attendees got the opportunity to learn new, actionable ideas for increasing women’s access and use of mobile technology from poor women themselves. The meeting culminated in a field visit to CARD Bank, the Philippines’ largest microfinance institution.

Grameen Foundation, one of the hosts of the meeting, has worked with CARD Bank to pilot a mobile financial services project that allows clients to conduct mobile transactions for their savings account, either on their own or through independent agents in their villages. The clients use their savings accounts to conduct various transactions in addition to regular deposits and withdrawals. They receive loan disbursements by getting a credit in their savings accounts and pay loans and insurance by sending instructions to the system to transfer money from their savings accounts.

Improving Access and Convenience 

Improving access and convenience is critical for CARD members – something the working group members experienced firsthand. On the way to interview an agent, we got stuck on dirt roads that had become impassable from the previous night’s rain. Hopping out of the van, we searched and waited for motorized tricycles which were few and far between. Three kilometers may not sound very far, but the lack of accessible roads and reliable public transportation made the journey quite a challenge.  Through the dust and heat, we finally reached the agent and were welcomed by warm smiles of CARD clients. It wasn’t a surprise that these clients favored mobile financial services; they now saved a lot of time, money, and energy by conducting transactions in the village rather than traveling to the town center.

Clients also highlighted the benefits of improved security – against cash getting wet in floods, holdups while carrying cash, and their own impulse to spend cash in their pockets.

Improving Efficiency

We also visited a traditional microfinance center meeting where transactions were done manually. About 30 minutes before the meeting began, clients arrived at the meeting venue and started handing over their payments. The cash was counted and recorded several times, and the loan officer spent almost an hour recording payments and updating passbooks.

Mobile financial services enabled them to improve operational efficiency by reducing the frequency of center meetings from weekly to monthly. We also saw how the center meetings no longer have to deal with cash and recording and can focus on more value-adding activities.

What’s unique?

This deployment leverages trusted intermediaries – CARD Bank, its field staff, and its local agents, who are members themselves – to deliver mobile financial services. Building on this tightly knit social network has several benefits:

• it encourages trust from clients as they personally know their agents;
• prestige is associated with being a partner of CARD and serves as a non-monetary incentive;
• agent fraud can be minimized as agents would be wary of the reputational risk associated with committing violations.

In addition, the project employed a human-centered approach to iteratively design solutions. At first, the pilot was on a self-serve basis, i.e. to pay a loan, each client initiates an instruction from her own phone. While this was empowering for most, there were some clients that found this costly as they were required to keep airtime on their phones. This prompted the team to design an agent-assisted or over-the-counter solution as an alternative for those who are unable to transact themselves.

Gateway to Financial Inclusion

The delivery of technology solutions through trusted intermediaries in the rural villages of the Philippines is a pathway toward access to financial services that help poor households manage daily household cash flows, cushion against risk, and build assets to secure their family’s future. It can be easy to forget how critical such innovations are to the lives of the rural poor unless we are out there experiencing it with them, like the mWomen Working Group did.

Top photo by Erika Tatad; Bottom photo by GSMA mWomen.