Microfinance institutions (MFIs) are becoming more efficient. This brief sheds light on how the age of individual MFIs and the age of the industry affect efficiency improvements. On an MFI level the authors look into scale economies, cost structure, and process durations as potential efficiency...

In inclusion circles, the issue of digital identity tends to be dominated by the perspectives of law enforcement (anti-money laundering and – terrorist financing), legal compliance (how long records need to be kept), and technological implementation choices (phones or cards, biometric or not)....

This report contains an initial evaluation of the opportunities for spreading financial services through business networks in local communities across sub-Saharan Africa. The central premise is that small, local business that are able to establish a data-rich, trusted relationship with financial...

This note reviews the Spanish experience with regulating the competition aspects of new mobile payment networks in the absence of formal technical standards. The saga is in two parts, as the strategy of the early movers, dominant telco Telefonica and leading bank BBVA, changed radically in...

Provides a formal analysis of the economic drivers for branchless banking solutions. It exposes the design trade-offs that occur at the each of the key layers of service: the retail network (transaction acquisition), payments network (transaction aggregation and routing) and account/service...

This paper contrasts the psychological and cultural richness of informal savings mechanisms with the simpler, more rigid and yet less intuitive format of digital savings products. Financial inclusion should not imply a rejection of informal financial practices but a synthesis of the informal and...

About a dozen developing countries have deposit insurance systems and several others are considering establishing them. These systems are typically created to prevent contagious bank runs, to provide a formal national mechanism for handling failing banks, and to protect small depositors from...