Financial Inclusion

Welcome to CFSI EMERGE

Recently, I attended the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) EMERGE Financial Health Forum. The event, held June 6-8, 2018 in Los Angeles, is intended to help organizations working in financial services and financial health learn about current trends, insights, research, and policy updates. This was my first time attending and I wanted to share […]

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Lowering the Cost of Remittance - the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

There was an estimated $55b billion in cross-border remittances in 2015. But how much of that, per transaction, arrived in the wallet of the intended recipient? Unfortunately, not as much as many of us would hope. The cost of remittances is quite high with the average cost worldwide nearing 8% in 2015. And in some […]

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Poor, Wanting and Without: The Payments Gap

Over the past several years, I have focused my time and energy on projects aimed at increasing financial inclusion in developing countries to help alleviate poverty. I feel fortunate to work in this arena; I find it both rewarding and interesting. Recently, as part of a project, I interviewed a number of people working on […]

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Two Remarkable Women - And the Mobile Payments Systems They Have Built

I had the good fortune last week to be part of the Glenbrook team attending the FinTechStage Inclusion Forum in Jakarta. Happily, among the attendees were two women I have known for several years: Maha Bahou of the Central Bank of Jordan and Carolina Trivelli of Pagos Digitales Peruanos. Peru and Jordan are two of […]

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Demystifying India’s Digital Payment Infrastructure

There is a growing curiosity about India’s payments systems. These systems, and their role in the “India stack”, have been the subject of many articles speculating their importance in shaping India’s future. Despite this attention, there is still considerable confusion about what these initiatives are, and how they interact with each other. This led me […]

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The ITU Digital Financial Services Focus Group Wraps Up

Last week in Geneva, the ITU wrapped up a two-year project – the “Focus Group on Digital Financial Services and Financial Inclusion”. Several hundred organizations and people participated in the Focus Group, which produced research papers and policy recommendations on a wide variety of topics. The papers are available on the Focus Group website. Glenbrook’s […]

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Money20/20 Wrap-up

We’ve seen a lot of innovation in payment initiation over the last few years. Apple Pay, Android Pay, Walmart Pay and their like have filled Payments News headline stories. But this year, at Money20/20, consumer-facing innovation downshifted to a lower gear. And that’s a good thing. Getting Down to Work “Mobile” news cooled because the […]

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Expanded Frontiers in Mobile Payment

One of the payments obsessions here at Glenbrook is understanding the ways in which mobile payment and digital financial services are taking hold around the world. Once effectively limited to the early success of M-PESA and P2P payment in Kenya, today there are a number of services underway. M-PESA itself, in around a decade, has […]

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Merchant Acceptance in the Developing World – Mobile Payments’ Essential Missing Link

Over the past several years, my colleagues and I at Glenbrook have been working on a variety of projects focused on bringing low-cost financial services to the poor in developing countries. While there has been a lot written on how mobile or eMoney payments systems such as M-PESA in Kenya have grown in many developing […]

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Reflections: Back to the Future

Today, Glenbrook celebrates its 15th birthday. It’s been quite a journey – an amazing one in so many ways – yet it also sometimes feels like we’re still on Day One! There’s so much happening in payments – and, more broadly, in commerce, financial inclusion, and crypto currencies! I was very fortunate to make a […]

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The eGovernment – ePayment Conundrum

The interdependence of eGovernment and government ePayments is yet another classic payment chicken and egg challenge. As we work with governments to build their electronic payment strategies we sometimes need to temper their expectations given this all-too-familiar challenge. There have to be enough digitally delivered government services to warrant digital payment infrastructure, but you also […]

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India – A Good Approach for Financial Inclusion

You may have heard about the Reserve Bank of India’s decision to create a new category of “payments banks”. Recently, the Reserve Bank of India approved 11 applicant institutions (out of 41 who had applied) to start the process of becoming licensed. The group includes telcos, non-bank financial institutions, retailers, entrepreneurs and the Department of […]

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The Global Struggle of Government Payments

Over the last year, I’ve been focused on government payments – a compelling mashup of traditional bill pay and multi-channel retail requirements against an intriguing backdrop of policy, economic, and political interactions. Although many countries have made solid progress implementing eGovernment initiatives (UN E-Government Survey 2014), the level and sophistication of ePayments implementation lags the […]

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A Different Type of Start Up: Payments in Afghanistan

Imagine a country where less than 10% of the adult population has a bank account and only about half of those account holders have a debit card. Credit cards are virtually non-existent. There are only a couple dozen banks in the whole country. Cash truly is king. Now imagine decades-long political and sectarian conflict that […]

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The Loosely Woven Threads of Sibos 2014

I’m just back from Boston and the marathon known as Sibos 2014. In a post earlier this week, I shared a couple of observations from the show floor and the conference sessions. Now that the conference has closed, I’m thinking about the themes that spoke to me. And, this year, I didn’t get the sense […]