Agent networks are essential to deliver financial services and enable cash-in and cash-out (CICO) transactions at the last mile. However, CICO growth in Kenya is focused around urban areas and significantly lower in rural and remote clusters. This report maps the uptake and usage of DFS in Kenya, especially in rural areas, and explores the current practices and challenges in agent network management. The report further highlights lessons from Kenya and provides recommendations for financial service providers, regulators, and policymakers to boost rural CICO networks.
Access the cross country analysis Kenya report here
Agent networks are essential to deliver financial services and enable cash-in and cash-out (CICO) transactions at the last mile. This report maps the uptake and usage of DFS in India, with a focus on rural areas. It explores the business models adopted by banks, BCNMs, and agents, and the current practices agent network management. The report further highlights lessons from India and provides recommendations for financial service providers, regulators, and policymakers to boost rural CICO networks.
Access the cross country analysis India report here
It has been a grim year for us all. Yet 2020 showed us the sheer resolve and strength of low- and moderate-income communities as they battled the effects of the pandemic. And now, we can all look to the new year with hope. Here, we have curated the stories of 10 flagship projects where MSC’s work has had a substantial impact to improve the lives of LMI communities across Africa and Asia.
MFIs and agents who serve 25 million-plus customers used MSC’s informative comic booklets on coronavirus that focus on MFI client and staff, Self Help Group and CICO agents to reduce infection and death across more than 15 countries across three continents.
We worked with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Government of India (GoI) to monitor the response and readiness of state governments to address COVID-19. This enabled the government to help laggard states replicate good practices and plug weaknesses, and provided inputs to design the overall USD 285-billion relief package. See our fourth report and the accompanying dashboard. To gauge the effectiveness of the portion of the overall package (worth USD 23 billion) focused on the social safety net beneficiaries, we conducted two demand-side telephonic surveys of 5,000 households in 18 states. This provided inputs to the government to optimize how it implemented the package.
The FinTech committee of the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) has utilized recommendations from our six-country Inclusive Fintech Study to make informed decisions on upcoming regulatory text for sandboxes and support the states’ National Financial Inclusion strategies.
The success of the Pathways to Enhancing Financial Inclusion (PEFI) program has prompted the Department of Financial Services (DFS) to roll it out in 112 districts across India. This will have a positive impact on the financial lives of 161 million-plus beneficiaries, including more than 80 million women.
The Financial Inclusion Lab has nurtured 27 early-stage startups across India in three cohorts thus far. Cumulatively, these startups have already served 29 million individuals and raised more than USD 14.5 million in funding. It has also helped 6,900 micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) scale their businesses, and created 16,000 livelihoods in tier-2 and 3 cities and rural towns of India.
MSC led the “Awareness, Communication, and Outreach” working group of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Situation Room response to COVID-19. The working group produced valuable tools to optimize communication of emergency support programs.
In collaboration with the National Financial Inclusion Council of Indonesia (DNKI), we concluded a study to assess existing KYC practices adopted by financial service providers in the country. This has been a part of MSC’s ongoing support to the Government of Indonesia in implementing an electronic KYC (eKYC) process using the national ID database.
Countries in West Africa, with their large inflow of remittances, offer opportunities to create cash-to-account services linked to demand-driven value-added services. This report highlights barriers and opportunities in the use of formal remittance services.
With support from FSDU, MSC worked with the FinTech Service Providers Association (FITSPA) of Uganda to develop a code of conduct to guide the development of a robust and ethical FinTech movement in the country.
MSC conducted research to understand how the low- and middle-income (LMI) segment in India continues to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. This report provides insights into the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of the segment during the pandemic. It also provides recommendations for policymakers and financial service providers to help the segment recover from the crisis.
COVID-19 pressed the world to think with ingenuity, empathy, and work in unprecedented situations. The advent of the “new normal” in 2020 pushed us to produce content that evaluates the impact of COVID-19 on various sectors like MSME, agriculture, microfinance, and digital finance, among others. The focus of these evaluations was the impact of the pandemic on the low- and middle-income population with a particular emphasis on women and how we can deliver financial services to them.
MSC produced several publications in the form of reports, blogs, and informative comics that helps stakeholders understand how various sectors were affected and what governments, policymakers, and service providers could do to serve the worst-hit population across the globe. We present here some of our most-read publications during 2020.
The extended community quarantine imposed by the government to contain the spread of COVID-19 has hurt MSMEs in the Philippines. This report outlines the impact of the pandemic on MSMEs and provides recommendations for policymakers to support their recovery.
Amid the COVID-19 crisis, agricultural activities in India were exempt from restrictions. However, the lockdowns led to various disruptions in the supply chain. This blog summarizes the impact of COVID-19 on different sub-sectors and highlights the measures the government took to address the problems of farmers.
MSMEs in India bore the brunt of the lockdown announced as a measure to contain the spread of COVID-19. This report examines how the pandemic affected MSMEs and provides policy recommendations to help them on their path to recovery.
The financial inclusion sector’s combined efforts are yet to make an impact on women. This is due to two main reasons—women exhibit significant variations in their behavior, while players in the ecosystem generally overlook gender-centrality in the design of financial products and services. This paper presents the Financial Services Space framework for analyzing the behaviors and triggers that push and pull women into formal financial services.
Our ongoing research uncovered a set of unique challenges that cash-in/cash-out (CICO) agents currently face amid the pandemic. Here, we look at the experience and behaviors of CICO agents across eight countries and explore ways to support them through favorable policies, even as the disease rages on around the world.
COVID-19 is likely to have a widespread, deep, and prolonged impact on every sector and segment. In this blog, we discuss some innovations and practical solutions for governments and other stakeholders to consider to aid food security and protect the livelihoods of smallholders.
MSC developed a series of conversational comic books for microfinance institutions (MFIs) to inform their frontline staff members on safety measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. These comics have been customized for different geographies. You can access the country-specific versions in a wide range of languages as well.
As part of the same effort, MSC also developed a series of conversational comic books for microfinance institutions to create awareness, influence precautionary behavior, and drive measures to ensure the safety of the weak and the vulnerable during COVID-19. These comics have been customized for different geographies. You can access the country-specific versions in a wide range of languages as well.
This blog looks at the impact of COVID-19 on micro and small enterprises (MSEs) across low- and middle-income countries, which are particularly vulnerable to shocks. Our research insights will help policymakers and financial institutions support the recovery and rebuilding of the MSME sector in the wake of the pandemic.
This blog examines EasyPlan, a new-age digital savings app that allows low- and middle-income segments to overcome their chronic state of under-saving. Read on to see how EasyPlan makes use of various behavioral nudges (including gamification) to make customers save more and better.
As with all players in the economy, FinTechs have also been feeling the heat of the pandemic. Early trends indicate a host of changes on the horizon. These include four key developments in the FinTech ecosystem. Read the blog for a deeper analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on FinTechs.
According to a Techjury, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day on the World Wide Web, a substantial part of which is text. Much of this takes the form of product reviews, news articles, and even social media messages, which contain a plethora of information that could help decision-makers in designing better products, monitor existing products, etc. People now use social media platforms to share grievances and satisfaction about everything from products and people to policies and programs. We cannot overlook the potential to utilize the data generated from such platforms.
The number of smartphone users across the globe has increased to 4.66 billion, while 3.96 billion people now have a social media account. Every day, 92,000 articles and more than 2 million blogs are published. However, we cannot quantify or analyze this data through traditional means. This is where techniques like sentiment analysis play a vital role.
Sentiment analysis is an analysis of feelings, emotions, attitudes, opinions, and thoughts, among aspects behind data sourced from Twitter, Facebook, and newspaper articles, besides other sources. The five-step process involved in this analysis is detailed below:
From a business perspective, this technique can help an organization analyze the perception of customers about its brand and in turn drive business decisions, strategies, and objectives. It can also help conduct a competitor analysis and build up business intelligence. Moreover, sentiment analysis is a useful tool to measure the ROI of marketing campaigns, support customer service, and augment public relations.
Though sentiment analysis has established itself as an important tool for growing businesses, it is increasingly being used in other fields as well, including government regulations and policy decisions. Regulators have used sentiment analysis to generate quick consumer insights and monitor consumer grievances placed by consumers against various financial service providers. For example, FSD Kenya and Princeton University, in partnership with CitiBeats, collected and analyzed Twitter messages to identify tweets relevant to consumer protection and directed toward 29 different financial institutions in Kenya.
A similar analysis can potentially also help policymakers gauge the sentiments of citizens and experts toward government policies and initiatives. Several research papers have already provided examples of the potential use of this technique in policy evaluation.
MSC has used sentiment analysis to gauge public opinion in several of its studies to evaluate public policy. The two examples below highlight the applicability of sentiment analysis to derive insights into public policies.
In its recent research, MSC used sentiment analysis to understand the public perception of Aatmanirhbar Bharat or self-reliant India, a blanket program launched by the Government of India to help citizens cope with the pandemic. We used data from Twitter to conduct the analysis. We selected keywords from online social media analytics tools like Brand24 and Google Trends for the analysis. The graph and word cloud below provide a glimpse of the results:
Our analysis highlighted an overall positive response to the program among the target audience. The graph on the left shows various emotions analyzed from the tweets. The most common emotion was trust, followed by anticipation and joy. On the right, a word cloud depicts words that occurred most frequently in the tweet corpus. The most common word was “Atmanirbhar Bharat,” the name of the government program. Thus, sentiment analysis provided a quick insight into public sentiment around the government’s initiative.
2. MSC conducted multi-round, multi-country research to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the low- and middle-income (LMI) segment. As part of this research, we also wanted to understand the public sentiment around the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY), a support program launched by the Government of India to help the LMI segment deal with the pandemic. For the analysis, we collected 80 newspaper articles from six leading dailies on the topic. The graphs below offer a glimpse of the results we achieved:
The program invoked an overall neutral response among the target audience. The most frequently used positive terms included food, relief, cash, and benefit, which indicate the satisfaction of the citizens with the benefits provided under the initiative. The most frequently used negative terms can be divided into two categories—those related to COVID-19, which included the words pandemic, infection, crisis, hit, and fight and those related to the on-ground implementation of the program, which included income, demand, and payment. The word “government” also held a negative sentiment, considering the context of the sentence where it was mentioned.
The two studies highlighted above can work as proof of concepts on how sentiment analysis can support policy evaluation through rapid feedback from a large pool of users to policymakers.
However, sentiment analysis must be used with caution. As we cannot choose our samples based on socio-demographic variables, a targeted analysis is not possible. Hence, some of the most vulnerable segments are excluded from this analysis, particularly those who do not have access to a smartphone, do not use social media, or are illiterate. Conducting sentiment analysis in regional and local languages is also a challenge due to the lack of well-established and robust algorithms that take into account the structure and nuances of languages other than English. Methods used to circumvent these roadblocks often compromise on the accuracy of the results. The availability of robust data on the topic of interest is another concern. The analysis requires sufficient source material online, such as tweets and articles, among others, to draw meaningful insights on a particular topic.
Regardless of these caveats, sentiment analysis can help businesses, policymakers, and regulators generate quick insights to inform decisions. It can also help develop an insightful, data-based marketing strategy for a business as well as any government program or policy. The early movers who adopt this technique will likely reap substantial benefits.
Data analytics credit: Mohak Srivastava, Pritam Kumar Patro, Mahi Balusu
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