Digital payments may be an important part of closing gaps around financial access. But how will digital payment systems be deployed? What design elements would create value for poor users? How can payment systems be the first stepping stone to other financial products? What are the regulatory issues surrounding mobile payment systems? This briefing note seeks to explore these questions and provide additional resources on these and related topics.
Publications
Viewing all posts with tag: Payments
Migration as a Strategy for Household Finance: A Research Agenda on Remittances, Payments, and Development
It is time to fundamentally reframe the research agenda on remittances, payments, and development. We describe many of the research questions that now dominate the literature and why they lead us to uninformative answers. We propose reasons why these questions dominate, the most important of which is that researchers tend to view remittances as states do (as windfall income) rather than as families do (as returns on investment). Migration is, among other things, a strategy for fi- nancial management in poor households: location is an asset, migration an invest- ment. This shift of perspective leads to much more fruitful research questions that have been relatively neglected. We suggest 12 such questions.
Remittances and Account Penetration
Countries that receive more remittances (as a percentage of GDP) tend to have lower account penetration.
Mobile Payments and the Urban-Rural Divide
Infographic: mobile payments are more common in urban areas, but there are important exceptions.
Urban-Rural Mobile Payments
The potential to reach rural communities with mobile payments has not yet been realized in many countries.
From Microfinance to m-Finance
In some countries it can take years to get a new telephone line installed. In 1990, there were just 10 telephone lines installed for every 1000 people in the Philippines. In Kenya, the ratio was 7 per thousand. In India, 6 per thousand. Compare that with the United Kingdom with 441 lines per thousand in 1990, or the United States with 545. For decades, public sector telephone companies in developing economies seldom had incentives or budgets to rapidly expand land line networks, and the private sector has had even less motivation to serve the costly-to-reach.