Kabir Kumar

Kabir Kumar leads Omidyar Network’s global policy and ecosystem building efforts. He is a former Senior Financial Sector Specialist at CGAP, where he led CGAP’s Digital Finance Plus initiative and coordinated efforts in key markets in South Asia. Kabir helped launch CGAP's program on technology-enabled business models for financial services and worked closely with some of the pioneering implementations in the mobile financial services space.

Kabir has been an adviser to banks, mobile network operators, technology companies, and investors in over 15 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His work has been quoted in numerous media outlets including CNN, The Banker, Economist, and NPR. He has a dual master's degree in public administration and international relations from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.

By Kabir Kumar

Research

An Overview of the G2P Payments Sector in Pakistan

Pakistan is becoming a laboratory for G2P payment innovations. This report by CGAP discusses the G2P payments sector in Pakistan and demonstrates how social transfers can help bring poor people into the formal financial system.
Blog

Pakistan: G2P Laboratory

Pakistan is becoming a laboratory for G2P payment innovations. A new report by CGAP discusses the G2P payments sector in Pakistan and demonstrates how social transfers can help bring poor people into the formal financial system.
Blog

What Is the Role of Start-Ups in Financial Inclusion?

This post explores the role of start-ups in financial inclusion by highlighting some of the themes from the recent Finovate event.
Blog

Banking 100 Million Pakistanis

This post on a recent report on Interoperability provides insights on why interoperability might be important, how we should think about it from a policy and market development perspective and how it should be measured, especially as it relates to financial inclusion.
Blog

Can Digital Footprints Lead to Greater Financial Access?

Cell phone use generates data – from basic call data records, to mobile money transactional data, to data from social media usage and so on -- that leaves what can be called a ‘digital footprint.’ The existence of this data is quite extraordinary for those of us interested in developing services for the poor and people with little or no formal financial access. In other words, it is available in a way that can be analyzed.