Searching: Research & Analysis

Social Assistance Payments in Response to COVID-19: The Role of Donors

Countries worldwide are using social assistance payments as a component of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This briefing addresses how donors and their partners can design and implement social assistance payments that are efficient and secure while providing recipients with reliable, convenient, and safe access to their payments.

Digital Cash Transfers in Times of COVID-19: Opportunities and Considerations for Women's Inclusion and Empowerment

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank Group, CGAP, and Women’s World Banking, has developed a joint white paper on gender intentional digital cash transfers in the time of COVID-19, offering guidance and considerations for policymakers to support women’s inclusion and empowerment.  

Platform Business Models

Internet platforms are taking the world by storm, making it easy for third parties to exchange goods and services. Adding financial services can improve the experience, but what risks should financial service providers and regulators consider?

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.