The following is a guest post we’re pleased to share by Ignacio Mas and Sheila Miller from the FSP program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Financial Services for the Poor team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sees as its core objective in its mobile money work stream to help develop scalable, profitably sustainable and internationally replicable models that bring high volume, low value transactional platforms to the communities where poor people live and work. We believe this can be an effective mechanism to deliver convenient, safe and affordable savings services to poor people, which in turn can help them better deal with the socioeconomic opportunities, life cycle events, uncertainties and risks they face.
As part of this effort, we convened a Global Savings Forum in Seattle during November 16-17. Our main purposes were to shed a spotlight on the need for safe places to save by the poor, and to discuss how these could be brought to millions of people who currently lack them through partnerships and collaborations between a variety of players. That is why the Forum brought together over 250 leaders and executives representing financial service providers, mobile communication companies, international setting bodies, national regulatory agencies and central banks, academics and financial inclusion experts. The MMU team at GSMA attended, as well as MTN, Telefonica Móviles and Vodacom, among others.
We see a need not only to work at a technical level to develop new viable business models and attractive customer propositions, but also to get the word out on the historical opportunity we now face with mobile money and the early success stories. We were therefore very pleased that the Forum got substantial media attention (see the Agence France-Presse and Bloomberg).
Leading up to the GSF, we were busy writing some dissemination materials which you may find useful as you explain the opportunity to policymakers, banking partners, your own management or key opinion leaders in your country. So we thought we’d summarize what we’ve published recently.
– Ignacio Mas has written several more journalistic, high-level accounts of how electronic payment networks and mobile-based ones in particular can transform access to finance in developing countries. These have appeared in the International Economy, Boston Review, and in a forthcoming issue of World Economics.
– Specifically on mobile money, Claire Alexandre wrote a powerful description of M-PESA in Kenya, dispelling some common misconceptions, which appeared as a CGAP Tech blog post, and Jake wrote in the NextBillion blog about exciting new research findings from two academic researchers who are conducting a large panel survey of people in Kenya, funded by our foundation.
– Jake Kendall has written a survey of the academic literature on the value and impact of savings for poor people.Ignacio wrote a series of posts in the IFMR blog on both mobile money and the value of savings for poor people. He has also written on the broader challenges for branchless banking in Lydian Journal, drawing on earlier blog posts he authored for the CGAP Tech blog.
– Ignacio and Mireya Almazán have written a couple of pieces about branchless banking, taking a bank perspective. One has appeared in the American Banker magazine and the other is still a draft.
We hope you will find these materials useful in your own advocacy efforts. If you think that there are still gaps in how we are pitching mobile money, please let us know and we can try to address them. Your advice on what is needed is most welcome!