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There has been plenty of discussion in recent years about the effectiveness of linking informal Savings Groups with formal Financial Service Providers. Some people will tell you that they are very eff...
Technology is essential if linkage is to work for savings group members and for banks. But what technology? A soon-to-be-published report for World Renew documents my research on Savings Group linkage...
The simple answer: Savings Groups plus access to a formal Financial Services Provider (FSP). Sometimes! A soon-to-be-published report for World Renew documents my research on Savings Group linkages to...
Financial Inclusion efforts for the world’s poorest people have particularly focused on urban areas, and have had some success. But there is a tremendous relatively untapped opportunity for the formal...
Everyone has heard comments like these: “Data is your greatest asset”. “If you don’t learn how to leverage your data, you’ll be left behind”. “Your number one technology challenge is to get control ov...
OK for most of us this sounds crazy. Cash management is a commodity. All the big banks do it. All the small banks offer it, even if they have to outsource it. Companies need it but there’s nothing new...
There is more hype, discussion and disagreement about Blockchain than any other technology impacting financial services today. There has been a lot written about blockchain (or more generally Digital ...
In a blog post last month, I listed some of the major challenges facing smaller financial institutions. One of them is the fact that customers are demanding more and more. It is hard enough for comm...
Because of increasing competition, and low interest rates, net interest income is going down. This isn’t what our shareholders and members want. But what can we do about it? In a previous post, I lis...
Community banks need to innovate. Most of us accept that. Too much is changing around us, too many other players are jumping on our turf. Regulators seem out to strangle us. And customers demand more...
Banks are dependent upon models of all kinds. This is because reality is much too complex for us to understand well enough for perfect predictions of the future. Models are used as a simplification of...
Ripple (amongst others) promises to disrupt correspondent banking by driving out delay, cost, complexity, and uncertainty. Will it deliver on this promise? Ripple has recently announced Series B fundi...