FINANCIAL INCLUSION 3.0: What’s at stake for digital finance?
Between 2010, the first year the Barometer was published, and 2014, over 700 million people became bank account holders with a financial institution or users of a mobile money account, reducing the number of unbanked adults today to 2 billion. This is the conclusion of the World Bank’s new Global Findex survey, published in April 2015.
Even if the challenge remains huge, the progress made over the last 5 years has been substantial and microfinance has played an important role in this, especially amongst the most vulnerable populations, amongst women, in rural areas and in the least advanced countries.
The Global Findex also shows that digital finance and the implementation of new distribution channels using mobile and internet telecommunications are playing an increasingly important role in responding to the challenge of access for all to financial services.
In this light, the 2015 Microfinance Barometer offers you an overview of this ongoing (r)evolution. Mobile banking, mobile money, networks of distribution agents, using digital technologies to improve access to essential services: we are witnessing the dawn of a new age in our way of managing, spending and transferring our money. It seems that the countries of the South and the numerous players of the microfinance sector are amongst the main innovators developing these new approaches.
This “digitalisation” of microfinance presents a formidable potential but is of course not an end in itself.
The United Nations is preparing to approve the new Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015. Universal access to responsible and fair financial services will be a part of these Goals, as a precondition to eradicating extreme poverty by 2030.
In the world of evolving microfinance, Convergences is renewing its call to all players – banks, microfinance institutions, technology operators, investors or regulators – to ensure that values of social performance, responsibility and the fight against poverty, remain at the core of our actions every day.
See the full Microfinance Barometer 2015 here
Jean-Luc Perron Vice-Chairman of Convergences,
Managing Director of Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation
