Banco Postal, an off-shoot of Brazil's largest private sector bank, has made banking available to wide swaths of the Brazilian underclass which have traditionally been overlooked by financial institutions. Banco Postal is able to cut costs and increase accessibility by providing its banking services at 5460 post offices around the country. In 2002, before Banco Postal was launched, as many as 1750 Brazilian municipalities lacked banking services. Now, Banco Postal has brought banking to 1675 of these municipalities. According the New York Times, "Banco Postal has more than three million account holders, and a third of them have taken out loans. Though most of the clients of these banks are unskilled workers with little job stability, their default rate -- 9 percent at Banco Postal, for example -- is not much higher than the market average."

For more information on Banco Postal and other "People's Banks" in Brazil, check out these two articles in Business Week [3] and the New York Times [4].