A Financial Analysis of Mobile Money Services
With limited reporting by mobile network operators (“MNOs”) on the financial performance of mobile money businesses, the paper develops a financial reporting framework to indentify (and quantify) operating costs associated with delivering mobile financial services to unbanked populations in emerging markets. The framework is based on a review of relevant literature and an analysis of the financial reporting of conventional money transfer businesses.
The Economics of Branchless Banking
Provides a formal analysis of the economic drivers for branchless banking solutions. It exposes the design trade-offs that occur at the each of the key layers of service: the retail network (transaction acquisition), payments network (transaction aggregation and routing) and account/service platforms. It also reviews the volume drivers of various existing deployments.
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day
It is estimated by the World Bank that 40 percent of the world’s people live on incomes of $2 dollars (US) each day or less. In other words, more than one billion people fall into poverty. For example, the poor in China refers to people whose daily earnings are below the poverty line of $1.25. It becomes increasingly important to systematically explore how the ‘‘bottom billion’’ find solutions to support their family and deal with emergencies. Portfolios of the Poor addresses this concern through documenting how the poor people in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa manage their daily financial lives. More than 250 villagers and slum dwellers in these three developing countries took part in this unique and unusual study of the daily financial practices. These households were interviewed for their detailed financial transactions every two weeks over the course of one year. This recently released research suggests new approaches of thinking about the poor in the developing communities. Most of previous studies are based on aggregate statistics, but this book focuses on the individuals and their everyday lives. Using a number of concrete examples, this anthropological research successfully provides an invaluable and convincing evaluation of the poor’s financial life quality from the bottom-up perspective. Three representative households are featured in this seven-chapter book. They are: Hamid, Khadeja, and their young son from a Dhaka slum in Bangladesh; Thembi, from a township in South Africa; and Feizal and his ten-member family from India. The authors tracked every detail of their financial lives. These financial diaries reveal both the nature of the poverty and the effectiveness of formal/informal financial devices. The findings are very different from the assumptions that most of the public (including myself) hold when seeking the solutions to fight the poverty. Most previous understanding is that the poor cannot make a living, let alone plan for the BOOK REVIEWS