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Weekly Roundup – 2/7/15: Debt and Forgiveness: A drastic solution to over-indebtedness among the poor
Seven years after a financial crisis caused in part by excess debt, all the world’s major economies have higher levels of borrowing than they did in 2007, said a report released this week. Meanwhile, one country has responded to excess debt among the poor by forcing lenders to forgive it. We discuss these developments, and some great financial inclusion news coming out of India, in this Roundup.
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- Agriculture
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Egypt, MasterCard Sign MoU to Drive Financial Inclusion
The Government of Egypt, represented by The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, and MasterCard have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish a strategic collaboration that will help drive financial inclusion and maximize government efficiency.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- North Africa & Near East
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The Technology Trade-off: Mobile tech boosts financial access but limits engagement. Can it also help build banking relationships?
Financial access is at an all-time high, and it’s growing fast. Yet account dormancy rates for the newly banked range from 60-90 percent. And though mobile technology has made more services scalable, it has also limited banks’ ability to build deeper relationships with their customers. But Juntos Finanzas believes mobile tech may also hold a solution to this problem.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Mastercard Opens Tech Hub and Preps for Masterpass in India
MasterCard has opened its largest Tech Hub outside of the U.S. in Pune, India, and plans to roll out its mobile payments system in April, the card brand said on Wednesday (Feb. 4).
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Payment Banks: How It Is Possible to Build a Business Around Financial Inclusion
Dattaram, 50, earns Rs 9,000 a month doing domestic chores in three to four homes in a Mumbai neighbourhood.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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India’s Jan Dhan Yojana has helped poor, but financial inclusion still far off
According to a World Bank survey in 2012, only 35% of adults in India had access to a formal bank account and only 8% borrowed from institutional and formal sources
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Mind, Society and Behavior – and Financial Inclusion: How should behavioral research inform initiatives at the World Bank and beyond?
Paying attention to how people think, and to how history and context shape their thinking, can improve the design and implementation of development policies and interventions that target human behavior. What does this mean in practice? And how should it apply to financial inclusion efforts, and to the World Bank’s work in particular? Douglas Randall discusses.
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- Uncategorized
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Bill Gates Explains Why Bitcoin Won’t Help the Poor
According to the World Bank, approximately 2.5 billion people (roughly half of the world’s adult population) does not have a bank account due to reasons such as lack of money, high fees, long distances, and complicated paperwork.
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- Uncategorized
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