This report summarizes the intent, activities, outputs and key lessons from an ambitious program of field research which sought to capture vividly and succinctly the essence of how ordinary people think about the management of their money and resources. We wanted to come up with simple...

With today's mobile money platforms, the value proposition for keeping money digital and driving up usage of digital payments is still thin. Mobile money is built on speed (real-time clearing) and liquidity (thousands of merchants where you can cash in and out). It's ready-cash (an immediately...

In India, the business case of the BC model is yet unclear. The main limiting factor is very low customer activity rates. Low usage is compounded by the prevalence of unduly low pricing models on the basic savings proposition, which is based on a perception that customers have low willingness to...

The Financial Sector Deepening Trust of Tanzania (FSDT) has conducted two censuses of cash outlets in Tanzania, in 2012 and again in 2014. The availability of places where one can exchange cash for transferable or storable electronic value is an essential component of financial access, and the...

Building a successful mobile money system requires a complex ecosystem of players handling a large volume of transactions. This paper identifies four principal paths to building mobile money ecosystems; makes the case that countries should adopt regulatory frameworks that allow for any or all of...

This paper reviews the growing literature that has spawned around branchless and mobile banking in developing countries over the last five years. Around 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to formal financial services, and yet 1 billion of them have a mobile phone. Branchless...

Cash imposes large costs on society, yet it is hard to envision moving to an entirely cashless society. If we cannot get rid of cash, then we need to change it in a way that makes it less costly for all to handle. We consider the possibility of creating a new kind of banknote that can be...

The paper reviews the relevance of formal financial services - and in particular savings - to poor people, the economic factors that have hindered the mass-scale delivery of such services in developing countries, and the technology-based opportunities that exist today to make massive gains in...

Mobile phones may have a huge role to play in expanding access to finance. But does the company that operates the mobile network need to actually provide financial services? Or should others offer financial services, with the mobile operator merely providing the underlying wireless connectivity?...

The potential of mobile phones to revolutionize access to financial services in developing countries is exemplified powerfully by the success of the M-Pesa mobile money service in Kenya. But the apparent difficulty of replicating M-Pesa's success even in neighboring countries suggests that some...