Searching: Research & Analysis

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

By opening up their payments platforms to third parties—such as financial technology companies, software developers, startups, and digital banks—providers can open the door to the development of innovative products that can be brought to market quickly.

Financial Services Apps in India

Smartphone applications offer a powerful tool for financial service providers to offer services to their customers—if done right. CGAP reviewed six smartphone apps currently available in India to find out what design elements are essential to fully deliver on the promise of marrying a financial service with a smartphone interface.

Understanding Consumer Risks in Digital Social Payments

Digital social payments (DSPs) are a fast-growing, yet often overlooked, digital financial services (DFS) segment. Acknowledging and addressing the most common and consequential consumer risks should be a priority for any program or provider seeking to unlock the potentials of DSPs for the poor.

Promoting Competition in Mobile Payments: The Role of USSD

Unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), a communications service controlled by mobile network operators, is a critical piece of infrastructure used to provide mobile financial services on most phones, at low cost, and without requiring access to the user’s SIM card.

Mobile Payments Infrastructure Access and Its Regulation

This research shows USSD access is an important competition issue in many countries since there are no effective substitutes that have been proven at scale.