Gautam Bandyopadhyay writes in the African Executive:
An exciting landscape is emerging in the banking arena, one where there is a billion-strong market actively seeking financial services but remains largely unattended to. These globally distributed prospective customers represent enormous earning potential for banks, but constitute the unbanked...[continue reading]
Alec Russell reports in FT:
Economists have long argued that formal statistics underestimate activity in the informal sector.Under white rule(in South Africa), townships were ignored by banks partly because they were deemed commercially unviable, partly because of the lawlessness, and partly because it did not occur to most bankers to expand services out of their “comfort zone”, says one executive drily.
Now, however, there is a dual impulse for banks to reassess their old ways: there is growing awareness of the size of the informal economy and the rewards from tapping it; and they also need to fulfil their obligations to the banking charter, which requires banks to make amends for the past, when they catered mainly to whites, by expanding services...[continue reading]
A recent publication of the Foundation for Development Cooperation states:
Migrant workers and their families need financial products which make it easier to send, receive and manage international money transfers, and to save and invest their income. Microfinance is well-suited for remittance-linked financial services, particularly among poor and geographically isolated populations. Because they are poor, many remittance recipients fall outside typical bank client profiles, but are well within the market segment targeted by microfinance agencies. By extending remittance-linked services to the ‘unbanked’, microfinance has the potential to promote broad-based development while vastly expanding the volume of remittance flows mediated through financial institutions.via NextBillion