Searching: Research & Analysis

Agent Networks at the Last Mile

Most digital financial services users require agents to help them switch between worlds of cash and digital currency. Global evidence suggests six principles for building viable agent networks in rural areas home to poor, financially excluded populations.

The Future of G2P Payments: Expanding Customer Choice

There’s a better way to deliver government-to-person (G2P) payments. Modernizing the delivery architecture can increase value for customers, lower government costs and create competition among financial service providers.

Fintechs and Financial Inclusion

Based on pilots with 18 fintechs across Africa and South Asia, this paper identifies emerging fintech innovations with potential to improve the lives of the poor. It also highlights common challenges faced by early-stage fintechs.

National Payments Corporation of India and the Remaking of Payments

The story of National Payments Corporation of India sheds light on the quick and robust transformation of India’s payment systems. The lessons learned from the NPCI success story can be useful for policy makers in financial inclusion and other markets.

Building Inclusive Payment Ecosystems in Tanzania and Ghana

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, new success stories are playing out, yet little is understood about the approaches many countries in the region have taken to develop inclusive payment ecosystems. CGAP set out to examine pathways to inclusive payment ecosystems in two Sub-Saharan African countries, Tanzania and Ghana, to learn from their experiences.

Digitizing Agricultural Payments: Uganda's Coffee Value Chain

This is the story of how the United Nations Mobile Money for the Poor in Uganda worked with a coffee exporter to digitize one of the country’s most important cash crops. Learn about the dynamics of digitizing agricultural value chains and how organizations from different sectors worked to digitize Uganda’s coffee value chain.

China's Alipay and WeChat Pay: Reaching Rural Users

This Brief explores the emergence, similarities, and differences between China's Alipay and WeChat Pay and the affects these elements may have on the way they compete in the rural arena.

Banking in the M-PESA Age

This Working Paper explores three approaches banks in Kenya have used to respond to mobile money. While nonbank mobile financial services can fundamentally reshape the financial sector in a developing market, as they have clearly done in Kenya, mobile services need not represent an existential threat to the traditional banking industry.

Paving the Way for Digital Financial Services in Jordan

Customers are turning to formal channels that use digital and mobile technologies for remittances because these are often able to offer services at lower costs. As more customers turn to formal services, remittances will have an even stronger developmental impact, notably in countries where protracted humanitarian crises affect large numbers of people.

Digital Rails

Get a more detailed introduction to open APIs — what they are and how they can unlock innovation in digital financial services ecosystems — in this e-book.