The following is a guest post we’re pleased to share by Mireya Almazan, Associate Program Officer and Ignacio Mas, Deputy Director from the  FSP program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

What are you doing to help poor people expand their range of financial options? If you are well advanced on this, the Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to hear from you.

We know that poor people around the world save money, but most are not being helped by formal financial institutions to do so. Left to their own devices, poor people have to rely on informal options which are variously unsafe, unreliable, costly, and leave no useful financial history.

A clear reason poor people don’t save in banks is because banks are often not there where they live and work. When they do have a presence and the intention to reach poor people, banks find it too costly to deal with streams of people with small transactions at congested branches, and often discourage such business with minimum balance or monthly fee requirements.

At FSP we believe that a good portion of the cash being held under mattresses or invested sub-optimally in physical assets can be brought into the financial system through the wide availability of cash conversion points linked to safe electronic accounts. A new retail banking infrastructure can be built economically if we leverage things that already exist, especially retail shops in all villages and neighbourhoods and mobile phones found increasingly even in poor people’s pockets. mobile money schemes are an effective way of building such an electronic payment and store-of-value ecosystem, but this can also be operated by banks maybe using cards and point-of-sale terminals.

If you are on the way to solving these problems, we want to learn from your experiences and showcase your success. We want to be sure the industry knows who the more committed, successful players who are taking financial services to the poor at scale, striving to make the economics work for savings.

For this purpose, we have just issued a call to showcase promising deployments in banking beyond branches, with two categories of success. The first, the Bridges to Cash showcase, will recognize players who have built a dense and sustainable network of cash merchants where people cash in and cash out conveniently from their electronic accounts. We are looking for schemes where the number of cash merchants is at least 10 times the number of bank branches of the largest bank in the country where it operates, and the average number of transactions per cash merchant per day is at least 30. The second, the Digital Piggy Bank showcase, will recognize players who successfully market the account for reasons beyond making payments—those that can most likely lead to safe places to save. Here we are looking for schemes that can demonstrate the account is being used as a store of value, with at least 100,000 customers with a non-zero balance in their electronic accounts, and have these meet specific criteria around account usage. More details on the criteria for these showcase opportunities are available here.

If you meet these criteria, let us know at [email protected]. We don’t offer any prize or financial incentive, we are offering only publicity, an opportunity to feel good, maybe if we get sufficiently organized a plaque to hang on your wall, and some bragging rights. The first set of companies that claim success will be showcased at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Africa Summit in May, but for that we’ll need to hear from you by March 26, 2011.

This is a nascent industry, and the industry needs a set of early heroes.