NextBillion.net - Development Through Enterprise - TN4B: Focus on Financial Services - Comments

Remittance

Antony — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 03:51:13 -0400

Hi, We are involved in setting up a global remittance initiative, and are actively seeking partners in different parts of the world. Please contact me if you are intertested in exploring this further.

Very interesting

Anonymous — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:04:28 -0400

Hi, I work for a microfinance bank in Mexico and your graph has cought my attention. I would be very interested in looking at it. My email is gabmiz@gmail.com . If you have a chance, it would be very interesting to look at graphs so please email me the source (I tried to search for it through the IADB website but unable). Regards

Remittance from Europe to South Asia

Alok Mahapatra — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:59:43 -0400

Hi, I am working as a consultant for a start up remittance firm based in western europe. I am interested in learning more about your remittance system - "The system is carrier, device and network agnostic". Thanks Alok

Workers Remittances

Mr Faulkner — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 04:04:38 -0400

Mr Kramer, I have been working in Africa where in some countries remittances from abroad account for up to 30% of household incomes. USD 20 million per day is sent to Nigeria with USD 500 million being sent to Kenya every year. In Eastern Europe USD 40 million per week is sent home. We have come up with a secure very low cost way of sending small amounts using a mobile phone without creating a closed user group like most initiatives that are starting to emerge. The system is carrier, device and network agnostic.To send USD 20 would cost the remitter USD 2 and is free to the beneficiary the paying agent will receive his fee from us and FX spreads have all but been eliminated. World Bank estimates that remittances worldwide will exceed 1 usd trillion by 2012.

I would like to know more

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:04:27 -0400

I would like to know more about this..

TN4B: Focus on Financial Services

williamkramer — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:37:59 -0400

The Next 4 Billion includes a whole chapter on a topic for which we were unable to present a single, real number from our analysis of household surveys. Not surprisingly, the chapter is short. So, why did we include it, if we couldn’t report any numbers? And why do we recommend it to you?

Well, as these pages have shown numerous times, we believe that financial services are a breakout sector - for the BOP, for business, and for the development community. For the BOP, access to financial services means new jobs and income; the creation of formal identity (perhaps for the first time); the reduction of physical risk (it’s dangerous to carry cash on your person, or store it in your home, in many parts of the world); the economic empowerment of women, perhaps the single most critical element of development; among other positive impacts.

But wait, there's more! Special for the readers of NextBillion, something you won’t find in the chapter (we ran out of time and space….) The Inter-American Development Bank created for us a set of two graphics that represent why businesses need to look at the BOP. Here they are:

What these maps are saying, to me at least, is that there is a huge, unmet need waiting for smart businesses to serve. A lot of money is going places where there are no financial institutions. Were these not poor people, you can bet that this market opportunity would have been acted upon long before.

For business, the increasing understanding that the poor need more than microcredit opens their eyes to what I believe is likely a trillion dollar market at a minimum. Why a trillion? Just the tracked country-to-country remittances are approaching $350 billion; most informed observers are confident that this underestimates the between-countries market by as much as 50%, which gets us around half a trillion.

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