Ignacio Mas's blog

See what a profound transformation the internet is producing in information-based sectors. Newspapers are under threat from online news sources and blogs. These same web destinations are becoming less relevant as people simply lift and filter the information they want using RSS feeds. The music CD is being unbundled as customers buy individual tracks online. These songs get remixed and re-distributed across an ever-growing number of online content repositories. Books are increasingly digitized, and customers can now sample content and search for information across entire libraries.

The internet is a destroyer of digital products but a great creator of new kinds of customer experiences. Power has shifted to users: it’s no longer about the packages of content suppliers want to sell but about the content mash-ups users want to consume. Providers’ best response is to try to extract more customer information with each interaction, and use that to deliver even more relevance and convenience to their customers. Think Google and Apple and Amazon: the new corporate battlefield lies in the control of the user interface and the customer intelligence system that supports it.

Yet there is one information-based sector that seems deaf to the great sucking sound of the internet: banking. What is banking but managing information of who has what financial claims on whom? For banking, the internet truly is still just another channel. Sure, it has added transactional convenience, but has it changed how banks talk to us?

Why is the term microfinance still used by so many as if it were synonymous with microcredit? Credit is only one form of finance. All the more thoughtful commentators on the Andhra Pradesh crisis agree that debt should not be the only financing option available to poor people.

In a recent blog post, my colleague Jake Kendall and I explained how the Financial Services for the Poor team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation focuses on savings because it’s an option that everyone should have and because we felt donors have neglected it in the past.

But there is another service that has received even less attention from the microfinance community: payments. When is the last time you were at a microfinance conference and someone mentioned the payment needs of the poor with any degree of passion? And why do academic researchers devote so little attention to it?

Editor's Note: The following post was submitted jointly by Jake Kendall and Ignacio Mas of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

At the Financial Services for the Poor team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we have made a deliberate choice to focus on promoting savings (you can read about our strategy here). We think that saving in a formal, prudentially regulated financial institution is a basic option that everyone should have. Having a safe place to save allows people to manage what little they have more effectively and to self-fund life-improving or productivity-enhancing investments without paying the high interest rates associated with small loans. Accessing other people’s money through credit may not be right for everyone, but making the most out of your own income surely is. From a donor perspective, we need to move beyond microcredit and support the development of broader markets. In fact, too much focus on microcredit risks tilting the incentives of local financial intermediaries to funding their credit portfolio from external soft funds rather than via mobilizing local deposits.

As I go around the world talking up these issues, I am struck by how often I need to justify the value of savings for poor people intellectually. Sure, we should do more to demonstrate these benefits with actual data, and we are funding a bunch of studies in this regard. But why is the notion so counter-intuitive for many people? I would trace that to two misconceptions and two fears.

More than 3 billion people in the world today don’t have access to savings accounts. Many of these 3 billion fall below the less-than-$2-per-day benchmark of the world’s poorest people. Why are banks not doing a better job to help them manage their financial lives?

The problem is largely one of cost. Providing financial services to the poor is prohibitively expensive for banks. Each time a client stands in front a of a teller’s window it costs most banks from $1 to $3. If poor clients make transactions of $1 or $2, or even less, banks won’t be able to support the costs.

It’s also too costly for the poor. Most poor people, especially those in rural areas, live far away from bank branches. Let me give one example of a woman in Kenya. The nearest branch may be 10 kilometers away, but it takes her almost an hour to get there by foot and bus because she doesn’t have her own wheels. With waiting times at the branch, that’s a round-trip of two hours – a quarter or so of her working day gone.  While the bus fare is only 50 cents, that’s maybe one fifth of what she makes on an average day. So each banking transaction costs her the equivalent of almost half a day’s wages.