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What Can We Learn From Selling Soap?

This post includes a detailed presentation of CGAP’s analysis of 23 firms from banking, microfinance, mobile, fast moving consumer goods, and Silicon Valley. It also describes the key features of three Product Labs which will be established by CGAP’s bank, telco and other partners.

Faster Horses or Better Insights?

Customers often can’t or won’t tell you what they want, so you must work to dig down to what they really need. Valuable services not only meet a deeply-felt need, they tackle a poorly met need.

Customers – Especially Women – Drive Mobile Money

Tanzania is one of the fastest growing mobile money markets in the world. Today mobile telephone penetration is 49% according to Wireless Intelligence as of Q3 2011. There are four active mobile money businesses, the largest of which is Vodacom’s M-PESA which has over 2 million active users.

The Case for Product Innovation in Branchless Banking

CGAP counted 22 branchless banking services with more than 1 million registered users; we also counted more than 70 others which have not reached that threshold (as of Q1 2011). That’s about a 1 in 4 “hit rate”.

Waiting in Line…Where’s My Agent? Headlines and Highlights

I’m blogging from Dakar, Senegal where I had a stark reminder of why innovation in financial services is so necessary.

Cash Transfers and Mobile Money: Making it Work

There are many reasons to be excited about mobile phones as a way to distribute cash transfers, such as government payments or NGO cash-for-work programs.

Branchless Banking Headlines & Highlights: Updates from Africa and Beyond

Summer is now officially over here in Washington and the busy fall season is off to a quick start. If you are just getting back into high gear, maybe this is a good time for us to recap some of the things we’ve been discussing on the blog over the last couple months, some of the latest news that’s caught our attention, and some things to keep your eye on in the coming weeks.

Can Mobile Money Support Post-Conflict Development?

There's been a great deal of excitement over the last few years regarding the potential for mobile money to solve a host of development problems. An increasing number of post-conflict countries are all experimenting with or thinking about mobile money implementations. In addition to the normal issues and challenges facing policymakers and service providers, post-conflict and post-disaster countries face additional problems that merely serve to exacerbate the overall challenges with mobile money.

So Where Are We in the Link Between G2P and Financial Services?

The link to financial inclusion is one that can often get forgotten in the quest for payment efficiency.

Can Collecting Savings in Rural Areas Be Profitable?

The importance and role of savings with respect to the economic and social development of developing countries and of African countries in particular have long been recognized.

10 Things You Thought You Knew about M-PESA

Few initiatives in microfinance, or for that matter in development, have been as successful as M-PESA: 3 and a half years after launch, over 70% of households in Kenya and more importantly over 50% of the poor, unbanked and rural populations use the service.

Ethiopia Graduation Pilot Underway

The 500 participants in this graduation pilot have been selected in 10 communities that are particularly poor, ecologically diverse (both dry and dry-wet zones) and relatively accessible for REST staff.

Dakar Dispatch: Mobile Money and Financial Inclusion

The regulatory questions around branchless banking are often not black and white, but usually gray. What is quite clear, however, is that the private sector is raring to go in many Francophone African markets, and policymakers need to be informed now more than ever on the appropriate ways to respond.