Providing Financial Solutions

In order to provide effective financial solutions we must understand the key enablers to business model sustainability. This includes fostering progressive partnerships, leveraging the role of non-financial institutons, offering technical assistance, and the willingness to learn from failure. This primary topic area includes sub-topics like credit assessment, big data, insurance, and digital finacial services.

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Digital Financial Services

Innovation

Evidence on Impact

Metrics

Lessons from Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda: What CGAP’s National Surveys can teach us about smallholder households

Analysis: CGAP’s National Survey(s) and Segmentation of Smallholder Households in Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda explores the financial, agricultural, and digital demands of smallholder households. The surveys are a groundbreaking effort to build a representative evidence base for the demand-side of the smallholder finance equation. The links above provide access to both summary reports and full micro datasets for each country, for further analysis. This blog summarizes a few of the key themes and specific variations across the three countries.

The MasterCard Foundation and IFC release new handbook on managing risk for digital financial services

Report: Cutting edge approaches to rural and agricultural finance rely on varying degrees of digitalization to reach more customers, and reduce costs and risks of serving smallholders. However, when the the product deployed is itself digital, there are new risks to manage. This handbook presents a risk management framework for DFS.

Measuring customer satisfaction is key: Happy customers lead to stronger businesses

Tool: On August 31 the Learning Lab team hosted a private webinar for partners where we shared rationale and approach to measuring customer satisfaction in the rural and agricultural finance industry. The presentation from this webinar, alongside a short summary of its learnings and the full webinar recording are now available for public viewing.

Learning to manage risk: CSAF lenders' past year in the context of Inflection Point

Analysis: The Learning Lab recently supported research by the MIX on detailed 2015 lending data from leading social lenders, who make up the Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance (CSAF). The findings were summarized in the 2015 CSAF annual report, which takes a deeper look into the current state of the sector through the lens of donors, investors, and lenders. Dan Zook, Director of Investments at the Initiative for Smallholder Finance (ISF), unpacks some of the key highlights from the report, many of which corroborate and illustrate major insights from our study, Inflection Point.

Lights to legumes: How M-KOPA leverages solar home systems for agricultural finance opportunities

Spotlight:

M-KOPA, a winner of the 2015 FRP Scaling Competition, has taken a leadership role in Solar Home System financing. Read more to learn how M-KOPA is expanding its business model to address rural farmers’ needs through innovative financing options.

New IIF and CFI Accion report explores how commercial banks are influencing financial inclusion in emerging markets

Report: IIF and CFI Accion’s recently published report, “The Business of Financial Inclusion: Insights from Banks in Emerging Markets” digs into commercial banks and the role of digital technology in the emerging market, a concept the Lab is currently looking into for the RAF space.

From urban to rural communities: Applying CGAP's customer experience playbook to rural clients

Tool: CGAP recently published a Customer Experience Playbook to help FSPs increase uptake and usage among low-income customers. Although the CX Playbook is targeted at urban clients we think there are many valuable lessons that can be applied to rural communities as well.

Analyzing applications from the first FRP Scaling Competition

Analysis: The Learning Lab analyzes applications from the first Scaling Competition of The MasterCard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity. Findings confirm key trends from the first Innovation Challenge and identify new trends around bundled service offerings and digital solutions.

Open data platform launched with Smallholder Financial Solutions dataset

News: I'm excited to let our users know that we have now publicly launched our open data portal. The inaugural dataset, Smallholder Financial Solutions (beta version) provides details of nearly 800 existing financial solutions (including provider and partners, products and business model) targeting smallholder farmers in developing countries worldwide.

Engaging conversations from State of Smallholder Finance

News: A diverse crowd of industry stakeholders gathered at the May 5 State of Smallholder Finance event to discuss findings from the landmark report, Inflection Point.

The need for weather index insurance: What do farmers really want?

Report: ATAI's latest policy bulletin, Making It Rain, reviews 10 randomized evaluations of weather index insurance. The study shed light on the barriers around uptake and usability for weather index insurance. Their findings are consistent with the market trends we are witnessing as well as our own broader call to action in this space.

From CGAP's smallholder financial diaries to unlocking growth in financial solutions

Report: CGAP's recent study, Smallholder Diaries, offers valuable insights into smallholder financing needs and supports the broader case for customer centricity to unlock growth in financial solutions.