/financial inclusion

Financial inclusion headlines

Mastercard and Ingiz collaborate to boost financial literacy and inclusion among Egypt's youth

18 h

Temenos scores deal with Cebuana Lhuillier Bank

17 Aug

Mastercard launches Strive India

15 Aug

Paymentology and Mastercard join forces to foster financial inclusions in Northern Central America

15 Aug

Gimo raises $17.1 million to bridge financial inclusion gap in Vietnam

25 Jul

Argentem Creek Partners leads $20 million venture-loan round in Salmon

24 Jul

ISS launches mobile voting tool

21 Jul

BaaS firm BKN301 Group lands in Egypt

10 Jul

CBA to keep all regional Australian branches open until 2026

07 Jul

ScotPac selects Dancerace for backoffice overhaul

19 Jun

More /inclusion announcements »

M-Pesa goes live in Ethiopia

Kenyan telco Safaricom has launched its ground-breaking M-Pesa mobile money service in Ethiopia.

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LemFi raises $33m for immigrant-focused payments platform

Creating Climate Positive Companies with SustainableFinance.Live

Digital Dollar Project and Western Union pilot CBDC for cross-border remittances

India central bank to launch credit tech platform

Irish fintech funding slows down

FCA to take ‘balanced’ approach in access to cash regime

Survey suggests industry divided on CBDCs

Indonesia and Singapore set to introduce QR code payments

Neobank Zolve offers immigrant customers mobile plans

India to add AI-powered conversational payments to UPI

[New Report] The Future of Fintech in Africa 2023

Financial inclusion blogs

Fintech World

How To Develop A Omnichannel Banking Platform?

Abhinav Paliwal

Abhinav Paliwal - PayNet Systems- A Neo Banking Software Platform - India

Financial Inclusion

Beyond the Surface: The concept of Underbanked in Developed countries

Joris Lochy

Joris Lochy - Capilever - Brussels

Imagine a world without cash

Fintech appears to offer very little to the older consumer but at last the gap is starting to close

David Hensley

David Hensley - Enryo Limited - Warrington

Fintech innovation and startups

How to Launch a Digital Banking Platform?

Abhinav Paliwal

Abhinav Paliwal - PayNet Systems- A Neo Banking Software Platform - India

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Latest TV

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Creating Climate Positive Companies with SustainableFinance.Live

Paul Jepson, Head of Innovation and Science, CreditNature, shares with Richard Peers from Responsible Risk, how the workshops and community at SustainableFinance.Live enabled the creation of CreditNature and where their innovative solutions are taking them now.

How ESG and DEI strengthen the drive towards frictionless cross-border payments

Sara Solana, Senior Relationship Manager for Iberia at Swift, speaks at EBAday 2023 about the cooperative’s focus on driving instant and frictionless cross-border transactions. We discuss how DEI and ESG are an integral part of this strategy and what can be done at an industry level to ensure continued progress.

How the Cloud can help Achieve your ESG Goals

Speaking at TCF 2023, Dan Broten, Chief Technology Officer, EQ Bank, discusses the benefits of Banks using the cloud to achieve their ESG goals and what this means for the future.

Credit Education in Focus- Who holds the responsibility?

Satrajit “Satty” Saha, CEO of TransUnion in the UK, joined us at Money 20/20 in Amsterdam to discuss the importance of credit education in driving financial inclusion, consumer empowerment, the evolution of buy now, pay later and the industry’s readiness for the Consumer Duty.

The long read

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Scott Hamilton

Inclusiv: financially underserved most impacted, yet climate mitigation programmes achieve success

Scott Hamilton - Contributing Editor, Finextra

Discussion

Beyond the Surface: The concept of Underbanked in Developed countries

Joris Lochy

Joris Lochy

Scott, thanks a lot for the feedback. Much appreciated. Indeed even though the list of examples I gave in the article is already quite long, this list is far from exhaustive. A few more examples are: * Discrimination against certain minorities. Although laws exist to avoid this, we can not ignore there is an inherent (often unintentional) bias both in the automated risk algorithm and manual risk decision process. This means that certain minority groups are definitely "underbanked". * For medical insurance, obviously people with a history of cancer is not the only example. Everyone with a history of medical expenses or pre-existing conditions might be impacted. In many countries medical insurances are even more expensive for women, due to the expected medical costs associated with child birth. * Any form of non-traditional employment. In the blog I refer to freelancers and gig-workers, but obviously other non-traditional roles like e.g. artists, performers, or creatives are also impacted. * People with disabilities might need specialized financial products and services that aren't widely available or are offered at higher costs. * Language barriers for non-native speakers * Temporary Residents and people doing remote work (due to complex tax regulations) * ... Clearly the list is enormous, leading to a considerable percentage of the population being underbanked in some form.

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Beyond the Surface: The concept of Underbanked in Developed countries

Scott Hamilton

Scott Hamilton

Very thorough analysis, Joris Lochy! Perhaps we can chat on further issues here, some of which we've previously explored in Finextra articles?

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M-Pesa goes live in Ethiopia

Hitesh Thakkar

Hitesh Thakkar

Does this 51 million customers across 7 countries are inter-operate?

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What is an Inclusive and Instant Payment System (IIPS)?

Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan

Inclusion is already defined as “Any regulated financial institution (FI) can join the payment scheme.” I'd leave it like that. If you want an alternative system based on "empowering any FI...", then you can coin another expression e.g zinclusive. Moving on from nomenclature, important as it is, I want to bring up what I call "overlay apps" (for the lack of a better expression) that sit between the payor / payee and the payment rail. Examples include Zelle over TCH-RTP in USA and Walmart PhonePe over UPI in India. In the past, I've heard about PayByBank, PingIt et al over FPS in UK but nobody seems to talk about them these days. These apps provide value added features that the rail does not. For example, Walmart PhonePe provides "confirmation of payee" sorta functionality, which the undergirding UPI scheme does not (AFAIK). These apps are not owned by the rail provider and can pull out of the market any time e.g. Soon after Russia attacked Ukraine, Google Pay canceled Russia, thereby leaving Moscow Metro commuters high and dry and unable to buy tickets. Keen to know if you would accept a payment system as "IPS" if its rail does not provide the features listed by you but overlay apps do?

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Featured

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PayPoint faces law suit from energy charity

Visa launches African fintech startup accelerator programme

LGBTQ+ banking startup Daylight shuts down

Payments Canada Summit: Ghana's eCedi pilot

The long read

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Scott Hamilton

Unbanked, financially-excluded find Inclusiv a powerful ally

Scott Hamilton - Contributing Editor, Finextra

Elsewhere...

The long read

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Scott Hamilton

Financial trauma impacts huge population of underserved in society

Scott Hamilton - Contributing Editor, Finextra