Week of April 13, 2015

1. Commitment Savings:  FAI's Managing Director Timothy Ogden discusses the world’s largest and most successful commitment savings program for low-income households - the US tax system. Stanford Social Innovation Review

2. Financial Inclusion:  The number of "unbanked" individuals dropped 20% between 2011 and 2014 to 2 billion adults, according to the recently released Global Findex report. The World Bank

3. Impact Evaluations: "The debate cannot stop with whether or not transformation has occurred... The debate has to include how we define transformation and how we measure it...If there is no silver bullet for reducing poverty, neither does there appear to be a silver bullet for measuring transformation."  CFI

4. Remittances: It will take more than just lowering prices for companies to really "win" at disrupting the global remittance market - execution, customer experience, and customer acquisition are also critical.  CGAP

5. Universal Accounts: You'll be shocked--shocked!--to hear that some poor Indian households are having to pay to get "free" bank accounts.   The Wall Street Journal

July 1, 2026

Financial Access Initiative

The Same As It Ever Was Edition

Editors’ Note: Hi, Laura and Jonathan here. A few of the pieces this week come from people who spent years up close with how poor households actually handle money, and keep coming back with something more tangled than the story usually told, and more persistent. Tim will be back for the next edition. - Laura Freschi and Jonathan Morduch

June 26, 2026

Laura Freschi and Timothy Ogden

Financial inclusion’s efficiency is now exposure: Four notes from the faiVLive webinar on emerging AI cyberthreats

The idea for this conversation was born from alarm. At the news that the US Treasury Secretary and the Chair of the Federal Reserve had called a meeting with the CEOs of the twenty largest banks in America to talk about threats to the financial system from emerging frontier AI models, Tim had questions: what about the community banks, the credit unions, and the CDFIs—the financial institutions that serve low-income communities and small businesses in America? When will they be invited to the meetings on how to defend their systems against AIs that can exploit software vulnerabilities with unprecedented ease and speed? And globally, are the regulators in middle-income and developing countries also holding meetings to discuss how they can defend against these threats? Will those meetings include anyone beyond the largest banks?

May 19, 2026

Tracy Cole

What it Takes to Improve Small Business Job Quality: Midterm Findings from Shared Success

Small businesses in the US employ nearly two-thirds of workers earning low wages, making them central to both economic mobility and the quality of work itself. Shared Success, launched by Aspen Institute's Economic Opportunities Program with support from the Gates Foundation, is built on the premise that job quality is fundamental to economic resilience, particularly in historically underserved communities. The project worked with 11 community development financial institutions (CDFIs) to embed job quality support into their programming.

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