Theme: Digital Financial Services

Our podcast features Charlotte Ochieng, a manager, and Mandira Sharma, an analyst in MSC’s Banking and Financial Services sector. They discuss how financial institutions in Kenya should change the narrative to provide support to MSMEs. The institutions should improve access to markets, business knowledge, and access to advisory and mentorship for MSMEs.

This strategic insights deck combines insights from MSC’s multiple national-level studies on CICO agents in India and mentions specific recommendations for service providers to increase customer footfall at agent outlets.

This blog highlights the journey of Frontier Markets, a startup that uses its social-assisted rural e-commerce marketplace, digital infrastructure, services, and solutions to empower rural women from the SHGs and help them augment their family incomes. It focuses on lessons from Frontier Markets’ growth for other village entrepreneurship platforms that intend to scale operations.

In this blog, we chart Mool’s journey. Mool is a neo bank that enables Indians in the low- and middle-income (LMI) segment to take small steps toward saving and investing. Read on to see how Mool uses an interactive, easy-to-use platform to make customers save more and plan their financial lives better. Mool is a startup under the Financial Inclusion (FI) Lab accelerator program’s fifth cohort. The FI Lab is supported by some of the largest philanthropic organizations worldwide—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J.P. Morgan, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, MetLife Foundation, and Omidyar Network.

This blog, the second in this series, discusses the role of FinTechs as technology service providers (TSPs) in enabling last-mile lenders, such as MFIs, to adopt the DEPA framework. Read the blog to understand how TSPs can help onboard these institutions onto the DEPA framework while providing other value-added services.

This blog discusses the Account Aggregator (AA) framework, a consent-based system under the IndiaStack that enables data sharing across financial institutions. Here we look at the framework from the perspective of financial inclusion and discuss how microfinance institutions, which cater largely to low and middle-income (LMI) customers, may struggle to adopt AA at this stage.