Ignacio Mas is executive director at the Digital Frontier Institute. He is also senior fellow at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the Saïd Business School at Oxford University.
Regulations often give big financial institutions near total control over mobile money cash-in/cash-out networks. Changing the rules would enable small entrepreneurs to play a bigger role in building last-mile cash networks.
Advances in digital technologies and the increased availability of data can be used to support low-income customers to do more than make payments. These advances can help them to make financial decisions and develop strategies to manage their finances.
Digital services that are able to replicate what poor people already do informally, in everyday life, may be critical to starting new customers on a path to using money in new ways.
This is a companion paper to "Money Resolutions, a Sketchbook." It imagines digital financial services that would build on two common money management practices of the poor.
