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Customers

Insights into the financial lives of poor people, particularly excluded segments, help financial service providers deliver products and services appropriate to the needs and aspirations of their customers, creating value for the customer.

Business and Markets

The digital economy is connecting more low-income people to financial products and attracting a wider range of players to the financial services industry, spurring new ways of doing business and opening up new opportunities to achieve the SDGs.

Donors and Investors

Understanding how the financial inclusion sector is evolving is challenging for donors and investors alike. What role can they play in an increasingly complex landscape? What market needs should they be focusing on? How should they go about it?

Policy

Building responsible, inclusive financial systems requires a policy and regulatory environment that protects low-income customers, fosters innovation and has the flexibility to adapt in face of rapid changes brought about by digital technologies.

Cash-In / Cash-Out for Rural Agent Networks

Cash-in/cash-out agent networks are key to extending digital financial services and ultimately financial inclusion. Providers have struggled to extend these agent networks in rural areas, where sparse populations lead to lower transaction volumes and weaker financial incentives for businesses to serve as agents.

Proportional Supervision for Digital Financial Services

New Approaches to Data Privacy and Protection

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I have been working in the financial inclusion industry for 18 years, and I have never seen the kinds of gains in access we have seen over the past decade. It is an exciting time to be involved in financial inclusion. But we still have much to do to reach marginalized groups, improve usage rates across the board and ensure financial services are provided in a healthy, sustainable manner.

How Digital Finance Boosts Access to Basic Services

Can digital finance improve upon existing solutions and provide a better customer experience to make water, energy or other services that are essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) more widely available? These are some of the financial inclusion questions that CGAP is exploring.

Systemic Approach to Financial Inclusion

Explore CGAP's guidance on how to apply a systemic approach in funders programming. A systemic approach aims to catalyze systemic change that is significant in scale and sustainable and that comes with built-in momentum for replication and adaption, beyond the timeframe of a development program.

Beyond Switches, What Makes Interoperability Work?

CGAP's interoperability work seeks to help low-income users transact more easily across digital financial services networks. Exchanging payments is about much more than simply building the technical connections. Interoperability also requires effective governance, clear operating rules, and business agreements on how to support safe and reliable connections.

Trends in International Funding for Financial Inclusion

Platform Work

While a few platforms have experimented with offering financial services in partnership with fintechs and other financial services providers, this remains a largely unexplored area. CGAP is currently working with several platforms and their partners to pilot embedded financial solutions for platform workers.

Fintech and the Future of Banking

While many fintechs claim to advance financial inclusion, the link between specific innovations and financial inclusion is often assumed rather than proven. The reality is that it is hard for funders, investors and social entrepreneurs know which innovations matter for low-income, underserved customers.

Reflections on the Impact of Financial Services

Forcibly Displaced Persons and Financial Services: Why and How?

Market monitoring for financial consumer protection

Market conduct supervisors (MCSs) charged with protecting consumers of financial products and services place great value on identifying, understanding, and tracking industry developments and market-level consumer risks and consumer behavior—the activities collectively known as market monitoring.

Regulation for Inclusive Digital Finance

Digitizing Merchant Payments

With vast amounts of revenue and data at stake, merchant payments are widely seen as one of the key battlegrounds in the struggle over the future of digital financial services (DFS).

Lessons on Digital Consumer Credit from East Africa