A key theme that emerged throughout the week is the opportunity presented by the widespread adoption of basic mobile phones and, increasingly, smartphones and tablets. A webinar by Accion’s Channels and Technology team described how financial institutions can use mobile devices internally to increase staff productivity in the field, while the Helix Institute’s webinar on the Kenyan market echoed the theme, emphasizing the importance of engaging employees at every level of the organization to embrace new technologies.
Providers have the opportunity to leverage the two-way street of digital channels to learn more about and interact more actively with customers. MIX discussed its Voice of the Client project, which uses interactive voice response technology to assess customer satisfaction on a large scale. Meanwhile, in a webinar hosted by Innovations for Poverty Action, Marina Dimova of ideas42 explained efforts to deliver financial education messages as easy-to-remember heuristics through mobile channels in India.
The ecosystem must be supportive if mobile channels are going to take off. Interoperabiliy holds the key to unlocking the true potential of digital financial services, and it requires an ecosystem of open players. At a roundtable in France, Tagattitude highlighted the importance of an ecosystem that allows the underserved to not only save and send money on their phones but also to pay with their phones in stores (in other words, creating a dense merchant acceptance environment). Additionally, the GSMA’s Code of Conduct (highlighted in its FI2020 Week webinar) is a prime example of shaping one element of the ecosystem. Through this initiative, mobile operators around the world have agreed to protect clients through specific information privacy and risk mitigation practices.
6
9
New Channels -- What's Next?
FI2020 Week Roundup
The FI2020 Week Story
The FI2020 Inclusion Visualizer, designed by CFI and powered by MIX, is a tool intended to manipulate, visualize, and download images of data related to financial inclusion. Data are drawn from publicly available sources (with thanks and credit to the World Bank, IMF, EIU, and others). The Visualizer allows users to see progress and trends in financial inclusion, excluded populations, and financial inclusion's relation to larger development goals. Users can create their own charts with the ability to control variables and segment down to the country-level, or to organize data by region and income level.
See also the By the Numbers report on the most significant trends in financial inclusion, based on the Global Findex as well as other data sources.
Inclusion Visualizer
Ghana's Unbanked Population
Figure shows percent of people in each age group 15 and older reported not having an account.