The Better Than Cash Alliance is a partnership of governments, companies, and international organizations that accelerates the transition from cash to digital payments in order to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
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Cross-agency collaboration, national and digital identity and having common templates and taxonomies in place can help governments on their digital journeys. Read the new Citi publication on digitizing governments that also features case studies from Pakistan and India.
This ADBI brief discusses policy interventions that can help governments in the Asia Pacific region leverage fintech to close the gender gap in financial inclusion. It calls for ensuring tailored services that promote ease of use, flexible regulation to promote access and active coordination among relevant government ministries to enhance financial education.
New World Bank Findex note discusses the many ways in which young people in Sub-Saharan Africa are using formal financial services for entrepreneurship.
Over the past five years, mobile money has gained traction in South Asia, which is experiencing an average annual growth rate of 46 percent in mobile money accounts—the highest across all regions. For more details check out IMF’s 2019 Financial Access Survey that was released last week
The top barriers to mobile ownership in Asia are literacy and skills and affordability, with family disapproval also featuring as a major barrier in parts of South Asia.
This FinDev Gateway webinar offers insights into how organizations can approach digital transformation in a strategic way. It features CGAP’s Greta Bull and MicroSave’s Graham Wright (along with other speakers).
Payments generated $1.9 trillion in revenue last year with financial companies in Asia-Pacific taking home almost half of that amount. Read McKinsey's Global Payments Report 2019 to learn more.
The new Stanford Business “Blockchain for Social Impact" report is out! The most common use case among its sample of organizations is records and verification, whereas the challenges cited most often are regulatory. The interviewees reported that launching the project was harder than anticipated.
New CGAP focus note explores the core idea behind future-ready G2P payments, lays out its advantages and challenges, and describes how governments can create modern G2P payments systems. It draws heavily from ongoing efforts in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.
New Harvard University paper looks at the impact of demonetization on the Indian economy. It finds that, in the near-term, the event led to “temporary reductions in employment, output, and credit.” But “there may be potential longer-term benefits” in several areas, including tax collection.
This paper explores economic informality and how it relates to digital financial inclusion. It focuses specifically on the potential role that digital financial services–including those accessed through mobile phones and the internet can play in encouraging businesses to formalize their operations.
This book analyzes advances in women’s economic engagement and empowerment in rural and urban Bangladesh.
This report discusses Tienda Pago’s Digital Solution for Fast-Moving Consumer Goods.
This paper identifies and discusses principles and applications of Blockchain that enhance trust, transparency, and auditability in Social Business (SB) activities. It outlines the challenges related to creating a native cryptocurrency for SB, and barriers to infrastructure and technology adoption by different SB stakeholders.
This study discusses the emergence of bKash as the m-banking pioneer in Bangladesh. It focuses on the services provided by bKash and its current operating scenario in Bangladesh. bKash’s str…
New IMF paper outlines policy strategies to help promote financial inclusion through fintechs in the Pacific Island countries. It calls on governments to close regulatory gaps and enhance digital and financial literacy while urging fintechs to take a regional approach to overcome scalability constraints.
“Purpose This paper aims to identify, analyse and organise the literature about blockchains in supply chain management (SCM) context (blockchain–SCM integration) and proposes an agenda for …
Read the University of Cambridge and UNSGSA report on how regulators are innovating to better respond to financial innovation….
This USAID guide aims to: 1) illustrate how investments in ID systems impact individuals and their households; and 2) provide specific how-to guidance to help donors, program managers, and M&E specialists get started in thinking about ID ecosystems.
Women face additional constraints because of their gender that affect their economic performance. New Oxford University Press paper suggests that specific design features - repeated micro-lending, variation in loan terms, private savings accounts, etc - in financial services can yield more positive economic outcomes for women.