1. Retirement Savings: According to a recent survey, one in eight Americans tapped their retirement accounts over the past year to pay for unexpected emergencies, despite financial penalties and implications on long-term savings. Bankrate
2. Student Debt: PricewaterhouseCoopers announced it will assume up to $7,200 in student debt for its U.S. employees. According to one survey, only 3% of companies offer student loan repayment as a benefit. The Wall Street Journal
3. Research Methodology: An RCT conducted in Sierra Leone reports that a field researcher's race conveys subtle cues to research subjects, which could affect study outcomes — without anyone even realizing it. NY Magazine
Read More1. International Labor Mobility: FAI affiliate Michael Clemens discusses one of “the most effective development policies evaluated to date” and why it’s being ignored by major aid agencies. The Huffington Post
2. Small-Dollar Credit: Nick Bourke of The Pew Charitable Trusts suggests tweaks to the CFPB's proposed small dollar credit regulations that will allow banks to compete with payday lenders with better options for borrowers (hopefully). American Banker
3. Poverty Alleviation: "All programs have room to improve. 'Pro-poor' programs actually strive to improve toward greater effectiveness. Transparency and accountability are not just about separating wheat from chaff; they are about improving.” NextBillion
Read More1. Migration and Finance: We wanted to include a story on how refugees are financing their migration *and managing payments* but we couldn't find any. Do you know of one? Tweet it to us - @financialaccess.
2. Cash Transfers: Data from The Cash Atlas, an online platform that tracks cash transfers, suggests transfers are a growing (but still small) component of humanitarian interventions but are mostly conditional and/or mixed with in-kind transfers. Center for Global Development
3. US Financial Diaries: "Six months a year the [USFD] households we tracked had income that was either 20 percent above or below their average. So even the concept of average [income] is meaningless.” Next City
Read More1. Employment and Wages: Despite signs of an improving economy such as lower unemployment rates and increased productivity, take home pay for low-income workers in the U.S. has fallen since 2009. The New York Times
2. Behavioral Economics: Reminders are an oft-cited example of nudges that can improve welfare. Sometimes not following through isn't about forgetting or procrastination, though. An experiment using reminders to pay for child support in Ohio finds negligible effects. MDRC
3. Microfinance: "In the annals of Twitter spats, this is no Nicki Minaj vs. Taylor Swift. But even this muted public shade-throwing is relatively rare among anti-poverty stalwarts of Counts’ and Karlan’s caliber. And since IPA and Grameen Foundation are both NextBillion content partners, I feel the urge to act as referee." (Shockingly, reading some of the comments is worthwhile.) NextBillion
Read MoreRecently, The New York Times Magazine ran a feature on the bail process for petty crimes, with a focus on the Brooklyn, NY court system. Although bail was historically set as a bond to ensure a defendant will return to court for trial, it is increasingly used as a tool for incarceration. According to the article, at any given time, 450,000 individuals in the U.S. are held in detention awaiting trial because they were unable to pay their court-assigned bail. A disproportionate number of these are poor.
Read More1. 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.
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?
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.
Read MoreIn the past, we've talked about peer effects and low adoption rates of mobile money banking accounts in Bangladesh. Our research exploring these issues (as well benefits for migrant workers) is in full swing! It is a randomized evaluation, which means that half of the sample is randomly assigned to a control group, while half of the sample is randomly assigned to the treatment group, which receives training and assistance with signing up for mobile money accounts.
In this video, co-investigator Dr. Abu Shonchoy audits the training by re-interviewing a woman who was part of the treatment group to make sure that the training was thorough and made the service understandable to the participant . . .
Read More1. "War on Poverty": The bail process for petty crimes is leading to increasingly high incarceration rates for the poor. Many are not able to access funds to cover even a comparatively low bail of a few hundred dollars. In fact, 69% of the households below the poverty line in the US Financial Diaries project would not have emergency savings balances high enough to post a $500 bail.
2. Mobile Banking: India's central bank "pre-approved" 11 applications for banks that would take deposits and handle cash transfers. While this could positively impact financial inclusion efforts, the real winners are the Indian telecomms who are set to launch digital services like mobile savings and remittances.
3. Product Design: One Moroccan bank's attempt to offer savings accounts to the poor is a illustrative example of the importance of product design to the success of banking the unbanked...
Read More1. Cash: The artisanal movement may have reached its peak. Hipsters everywhere can now pay for their hand-sharpened pencils and small-batch mayonnaise with homemade, locally crafted currencies.
2. Household Finance: Despite recent economic growth and falling unemployment, many American workers are still struggling to save for emergencies or make ends meet. Financial capability programs, offered through employers, may help participants alleviate some of their financial struggles through knowledge and access to products and services.
3. G2P Infrastructure: The Indian Supreme Court ruled that biometric identification cannot be mandatory to receive government subsidies. Bad news for banks and financial inclusion advocates, good news for officials siphoning funds from "ghost" beneficiary accounts (see Muralidharan, Niehaus, and Sukhtankar's massive RCT).
Read More1. Financial Management: Communities in which social contracts are strong commonly use "social money" (non-cash modes of saving, storing, and transferring wealth) in daily transactions instead of cash. IMTFI
2. Consumer Protection: Isabelle Barrès, Director of the Smart Campaign, discusses the progress in developing and implementing consumer protection policies globally. NextBillion
3. Business Development: The world's most popular attempt at policy ranking might not actually tell us much about the reality. The Wall Street Journal
Read More1. Mobile Money: Vodafone and MTN announced plans to allow money transfers between East and Central African customers of either provider, marking a big step toward interoperability on the continent. The Wall Street Journal
2. Financial Management: FAI affiliate Ignacio Mas analyzes common behaviors and decision-making practices that underpin the financial management strategies of poor households. Upsides
3. Digital Payments: A new blog series explores mobile merchant payments in developing markets, with a focus on the factors it will take to build out the extensive networks necessary to provide value for both merchants and customers. CGAP
Read More1. Transfers and Subsidies: India's plan to provide subsidies electronically through bank accounts, biometric ID cards, mobile transfers (also know as JAM) can reduce leakage and increase efficiency but what are its limitations? Does it really have the potential to be "the holy grail of efficient and equitable welfare policy?" The New York Times
2. Evidence-Based Policy: The study of deworming pills that launched the RCT movement in development has come into question. But there are a lot of questionsabout the questions.
3. Credit: For rural farmers in India, increasing productivity often means purchasing expensive equipment with a loan, which may be difficult to obtain without collateral or a credit history. Could a financing model based on demand aggregation delivered through a local cooperative/bank partnership help? NextBillion
Read More1. Savings: A new report from the US Financial Diaries project provides evidence that lower income households are saving up for frequent, short-term emergencies that prevent the growth of long-term savings. Could 401k style auto-enrollment programs help to manage both long- and short-term savings goals? AARP
2. M-Pesa: Is M-Pesa merely a fintech service or [cue foreboding music] "a stealth political coup by a private operator which profits only from enforcing discipline, control and transparency (via massive data capture) over a wayward system?"... Financial Times
3. ...Regardless of its characterization, new regulations could cause Safaricom to separate its mobile money service from its voice, data, and infrastructure businesses. The changes could weaken Safaricom's market position, but may be a win for competitors like Airtel. Quartz
Read More1. Transfers: Cash transfers are a more common form of benefits for the world's poor than you might think. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where food and other in-kind transfers are more prevalent than cash transfer programs. The World Bank
2. Global Poverty: Between 2001 and 2011, the global middle-income population (those living on $10-$20 per day) almost doubled while those living on less than $2 per day halved from 29% to 15%. However, the poor just became slightly less poor as the portion of people living on $2-$10 increased 6 percentage points during this time while high income categories barely changed. Pew Research Center
3. Digital Literacy: A new report finds many women rely heavily on their social circles for instruction and trouble-shooting when it comes to accessing mobile internet, an important finding for mobile money and digital content providers. GSMA
Read More1. Mobile Money: What risks do customers perceive when using digital financial services and what are the consequences of those risks? A new brief explores these questions through the lens of lower-income customers in 16 markets around the world. CGAP
2. Financial Literacy: Most financial literacy programs are geared toward steady paycheck earners with long-term savings goals. But how can programs assist households that are struggling with volatile incomes and unpredictable expenses? Mediaplanet
3. Savings: A new survey raises the benchmark for emergency savings from 3 months to 6 months and unsurprisingly find few people meet the target. New research from the US Financial Diaries suggests that we're thinking about and measuring emergency savings the wrong way. Bankrate
Read More1. Alternative Credit Scoring: In a new working paper, researchers analyze consumer call data from a Caribbean mobile money provider and are able to predict the likelihood of loan default with accuracy similar to credit scoring models that rely on previous financial history. Brown University - Department of Economics
2. Consumer Lending: After 146 years of financing the 1%, Goldman Sachs announced it will venture into consumer (and potentially small business) lending. The New York Times
3. Mobile Money: The prevalence of over-the-counter (OTC) mobile money services in Pakistan means providers are no longer battling for market share among customers but for loyalty of agents. NextBillion
Read More1. Financial Inclusion: A comprehensive synthesis of various financial inclusion indicators reports large strides in achieving the goal of universal access by 2020. But what will be the next set of challenges to developing quality products for harder-to-reach populations? CFI
2. Debt: After filing for personal bankruptcy, San Francisco-based photographer Brittney Powell interviewed and photographed over fifty people for her ongoing series “The Debt Project,” which chronicles the struggles of ordinary Americans with large debt burdens. Slate
3. Poverty Alleviation: Due to the shifting and relative nature of poverty thresholds, does the quest to end extreme poverty still have meaning? Bloomberg
Read MoreThe 2014 Global Findex data has been a hot topic of conversation around the FAI offices since its release last month. While there is a lot to dissect in the 97-page report, the biggest headline is the 20% decrease in the number of unbanked worldwide - approximately 700 million people worldwide.
However, there are concerns that this number is overstated and the data leave us with outstanding questions as to why certain trends occur over the last 4 years. One reason is we do not yet have access to the microdata. When we can only use broad strokes to tell a nuanced story, many of the finer points are lost, like regional differences in financial inclusion changes.
Another example is the data around gender . . .
Read More1. Income Volatility: Insights into employment opportunities in the "sharing economy" (and research from US Financial Diaries) provide evidence that "life is no longer a matter of having or losing a job, but of stitching together a comfortable and secure quilt from a colourful range of fabrics." The Globe and Mail
2. US Poverty: Will a new "reality" show where families facing financial hardship play a version of the dictator game, judging how "worthy" another family is to receive a share of $101,000, undermine persistent myths and prejudices about low-income households, or is it just an incredibly crass, deplorable, and exploitative gimmick? The Nation
3. Financial Inclusion: IFMR research drives home the point that no matter what "inclusion initiatives" are launched, the behavior of agents will have a huge effect on whether accounts are opened and used in India. IFMR
Read More1. Mobile Money: Will a handful of high-profile fraud cases damage mobile money? It depends on how fast operators can adapt 21st century security and authentication systems to protect customers and retain their trust. NextBillion
2. Retirement Savings: For the 53 million public pension participants in Mexico, making a contribution to a retirement account is now as easy as buying a pack of gum or a lottery ticket (well, except for the delayed gratification). CFI
3. Microcredit: Is there a tradeoff in using digital products to serve microcredit clients and maintaining a strong client relationship built on trust or is it possible to have it all? SEEP Network
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