Research & Analysis

Instant Payments and Merchants — Pricing Policy Considerations

This technical note helps explain why changes in instant payment pricing are occurring, assesses their impact on market development, and offers suggestions for the path forward.

Starting the Transaction: Payment Initiation and Customer Experience

This technical note is framed to help policymakers and payment system operators understand recent trends in payment initiation and customer experience in making interoperable payments work better for low-income populations.

Global Landscape: Data Trails of Digitally Included Poor (DIP) People

Many low-income people generate rich data trails that are not being fully leveraged in the design and delivery of financial services. CGAP's reading deck puts a spotlight on the specific data trails generated by digitally included yet poor people, the sources of these data trails, and variations of data trails across different segmentations.

2021 Trends in International Funding for Financial Inclusion

CGAP’s annual Funder Survey breaks down financial inclusion funding data to offer new intelligence about who’s doing what and where—insights that could be used to inform future development programming and coordination, to ultimately impact the lives of people living in poverty.

International Funding for Financial Inclusion in 2021: Global Data

These data snapshots were generated from the 2021 CGAP Funder Survey and they may be browsed online or downloaded to share and use in your own presentations

Funding Explorer: Interactive Data for the 2021 CGAP Funder Survey

The Funding Explorer is a set of seven interactive dashboards reflecting active international financial inclusion funding commitments as of December 31, 2021. The Explorer uses data from the CGAP Funder Survey complemented by publicly available contextual indicators.  

Data Analytics Journey for Microfinance Data Analysts

This tutorial-style video takes you through the technical journey of data analytics function that supports data-oriented strategic decision making and business development of your company.

Business Intelligence: A Bedrock of Successful Digitization in Microfinance

Microfinance institutions that successfully generate value for their business and customers through digitization anchor these efforts in business intelligence. This Technical Note outlines an approach for improving business intelligence with interventions that require minimum or no investment in technology. CGAP also offers a customer dashboard library with detailed instructions for data teams and a tutorial video.

Emerging Trends in National Financial Inclusion Strategies that Support Women’s Entrepreneurship

Women entrepreneurs continue to face persistent gender-based barriers that impede their success – such as unequal access to financial accounts, constrained credit, and normative roles that keep women in the role of primary caregivers. Improved financial inclusion can help reduce some of these barriers. This WBL-CGAP Brief presents data collected by the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project on how National Financial Inclusion Strategies can spur policy and regulatory reforms in support of women’s entrepreneurship. 

Combining Open Finance and Data Protection for Low-Income Consumers

Open finance gives low-income consumers greater control of their personal information, helping make their data work for them, giving them access to more products at lower costs through multiple and easy-to-access channels, and allowing for remote consumer onboarding. Under open finance, with consent from the customer, banks and financial service providers (FSPs) would be required to share consumer data with other FSPs and/or third-party providers, such as fintechs. However, this unprecedented ability to move entire financial histories both empowers consumers and poses risks.