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China's Super Platforms: The Impact Question

What impact are super platforms having on low-income customers and small businesses? CGAP and Mastercard Foundation traveled to China to see firsthand.

2017 Global Findex: Behind the Numbers on Rural China

What does (and doesn't) the latest Findex tell us about China's urban-rural divide in financial inclusion?

Public Clearinghouse Could Shake Up China’s Mobile Payment Market

China will soon require payments providers, including Alipay and WeChat Pay, to connect to a public online payments clearinghouse. Here’s what we know so far about how this institution will work and what it could mean for mobile payments.

Smartphones Are Common in Myanmar: Is Digital Finance Far Behind?

Smartphone penetration of 80 percent and low bank account access suggest that digital financial services will take off in Myanmar. China’s experience may offer clues about how and when this will happen.

QR Codes and Financial Inclusion: Reasons for Optimism

QR codes are gaining traction in China as a way to make digital payments, but will they catch on in other countries?

What Can Mobile Money Make Possible? China Has Many Answers

What's the secret to Alipay and WeChat Pay's success in mobile payments? Creating in-app universes of bundled services has played a big role by making mobile payments more useful to customers.

Inside QR Codes: How Black & White Dots Simplify Digital Payments

QR codes last year facilitated $2.5 trillion in retail payments in China, and their use is gaining momentum in countries like India. But how do they work? And what is their potential to increase financial inclusion?

Six Tips for Policy on Disruptive Digital Financial Inclusion

Digital technologies are changing the financial inclusion landscape worldwide by revolutionizing access to finance, connecting hundreds of millions to formal financial services for the first time. Financial market regulators, supervisors and overseers are racing to keep pace with these developments.

New Accounts in China Drive Global Financial Inclusion Figures

The 2014 Findex found that of the world’s 500 million newly banked adults, more than one third (180 million) live in China. Three positive trends emerge from this data.

Leveraging Mobile Phone Data: Tiaxa’s Balance Advance

Tiaxa's balance advance service is making 50 million advances each month to prepaid mobile subscribers - generally at no extra cost to the end user. How does it work? Big data plays a part.

Killer Apps in China: Social Networks and Financial Inclusion

In China, financial services offered through social media have recently begun to take off, with interesting potential to expand financial inclusion.

Postal Savings Bank of China: Inclusive Finance in Rural China

The Postal Savings Bank of China has five advantages over the "big 4" commercial banks when it comes to serving the rural population.

Bridging the Urban-Rural Corridor in China

Migrant workers remain one of the most financially excluded population segments in China. Without bank accounts, sending money home via remittances can be complicated and expensive.

China and Kenya: Different Models for Scaling Branchless Banking

In China, branchless banking initiatives are starting to reach scale, but the story has different foundations from other country success stories, such as Kenya.

Branchless Banking in China: Will Regulation Support Innovation?

China's pilot of 500,000 banking agents show significant promise for financial inclusion. Allowing these agents to offer a greater variety of services, such as taking deposits and opening new accounts, could lead to faster growth and more usage.

Financial Inclusion in China: Will Innovation Bridge the Gap?

Technology and innovation hold great promise for deepening financial access in China. But despite recent improvements, China is home to a huge unbanked population - second only in size to India.

Microfinance, E-Commerce, Big Data and China: The Alibaba Story

China's Alibaba Group is not only the world's largest e-commerce company, but it is also an innovator in microfinance. Alibaba leverages big data to link rural villages with the goods, sales channels and financial services they need to grow their businesses.

China – The Future Leader in Branchless Banking for the Poor?

A look at the world's biggest market for branchless banking.

Financial Inclusion Highlights From China And Myanmar

In my (Chinese) New Year blog post of 2012, I predicted significant changes during the year of the dragon. I was not disappointed for sure. From a personal perspective I moved back to East Asia after several years of absence, and it was hard to recognize the region given the pace of development. In the last ten years poverty in East Asia has fallen from close to 50% down to 35% and economic growth has been relatively high compared with the rest of the world. Some of the most notable change has taken place in China, and in Myanmar more recently.

Getting The Proof To The Top Of The Pile

Policymakers are swamped. They have a wide range of interest groups talking to them all the time, they have large numbers of papers and emails and phone calls to deal with every day. So if you approach them with a brilliant evaluation that is fifty pages long, complete with graphs and tables and lots of Greek equations, it will go straight to the bottom of the stack. And stay there.