Millions of informal workers are joining gig platforms but remain underserved by the formal financial system. CGAP’s 3-year project explored opportunities to connect gig workers to financial services through those platforms.
Cash-in/ Cash-out (CICO) agent networks are important for digital financial services to be used by rural customers. Over five years, CGAP researched innovations, practices, policies, and regulations that enable greater reach and quality of rural agents.
Consumer voices are often missing in financial sector regulation design. CGAP generated insights and research to help elevate the collective voice in financial regulation, including consumer associations.
The pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) solar industry emerged during the early 2010s. CGAP helped a young industry to become more robust and more investable, spurring a new era of partnerships and ways to measure performance.
Many impact investors and donors want to maximize their impact by supporting fintech innovations. CGAP published a Funder’s Guide that presents a vision for how funders can support fintechs in low-income communities in enabling innovative business models.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) enable exciting advances in financial inclusion. CGAP set out to prove to industry leaders that open APIs were a win-win situation.
FATF recommendations on bank customer due diligence were a significant obstacle to advancing formal financial inclusion. CGAP worked with the World Bank to successfully advocate for risk-based approaches to be adopted in these recommendations.
Regulatory sandboxes can be a powerful tool to advance policy objectives. CGAP created practical technical guidance to help regulators make more intentional and objective-driven decisions about whether and how to build regulatory sandboxes.
Ghana had a very limited mobile money sector in 2010. CGAP set out to bring regulators and providers on board by facilitating discussion between both sides and offering technical guidance on developing regulations.
Designing programs that have a lasting impact for poor populations can be challenging. CGAP convened, co-led, and financially supported the multiyear Graduation Program to test the 'graduation approach' through social protection, livelihood, and financial inclusion interventions.
In the early days of mobile money and digital financial services, there was little guidance on what the main building blocks of an enabling regulatory framework looked like. CGAP’s multi-country research culminated in a landmark research paper on basic regulatory enablers.
The success of digital credit requires a careful balancing act to ensure consumers are not exposed to high risks and adverse outcomes. CGAP partnered with providers to identify consumer protection issues emerging from digital credit and test potential solutions.
Government-to-person (G2P) digital payment systems are vital for distributing financial assistance to people in need. In 2019, CGAP developed and shared the concept of G2P Choice, and, in 2022, published a comprehensive report fleshing out its architecture.
CGAP advocated for financial services that holistically respond to the broad range of smallholder needs, designing and conducting a series of pilot projects focused on leveraging digital financial services to improve smallholder families’ access to education.