Week of June 9, 2014

1. Financial Services: An audit study of financial institutions in peri-urban Mexico found staff voluntarily provides little information about avoidable fees and clients are almost never offered the cheapest product. The World Bank

2. US Income Inequality: "'Economic despair' provides a decisive blow to the nation’s mythical identity as the land of opportunity: for many children at the bottom, it suggests, opportunity is not just out of reach. It is inconceivable." The New York Times

3. Digital Payments: 10 days in Kenya. No cash. 1 mobile phone. Business Week

4. Financial Inclusion: Ronald Brownstien's first lesson from "navigating the archipelago of check cashers, payday lenders, and discount store money desks"? It’s expensive to be poor. National Journal

5. Mobile Money: Three major telecoms in Tanzania announced the launch of the first interoperable mobile money service in Africa, allowing users to send and receive funds across networks. Business Daily Africa

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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