Week of August 24, 2015

1. Digital Financial Inclusion: The 2015 Financial and Digital Inclusion Project (FDIP) evaluates 21 countries on various dimensions of financial inclusion. Four out of the top five of the top scorers are in sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya ranked number one. Brookings

2. Mobile Money: Speaking of Kenya, Uber began accepting cash in Nairobi and its fleet of 30 registered vehicles tripled since the policy change in January. Is cash still king in the country known for unprecedented mobile money success? Daily Nation

3. Product Design: Evelyn Stark brings us Part 2 of her examination of customer-centric product development, focusing on organizational strategy and demand-side factors of improving take up. CFI

4. Labor Policy: The Obama administration proposed new rules to overtime pay that could potentially increase incomes for more than 5 million workers. Pew Research

5. Payments: India's move to approve payment banks garnered a lot of media attention, but the central bank has a long list of "to do's" before it can make an impact for the poor and unbanked. NextBillion

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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