MSC’s study reports that DBT (India’s flagship G2P program) has a positive impact on women’s lives, as it increased their disposable income, decision-making abilities, and confidence.
Watch the video to learn more.
Lending to cash-in cash-out (CICO) agents in developing countries remains a vastly underserved market despite its investment potential. Agents borrow for startup costs, working capital needs, and investments to grow their adjacent businesses, which forms the Start-Work-Grow lifecycle. Investments in lending to agents offer investors a compelling opportunity to gain exposure to rapid digitization and the growth of small businesses in emerging markets.
Agent businesses serve as compelling entry points into small business lending. Their ties to larger financial service and telecom providers and dependence on them impart greater security and reduced risk than other small business segments. Investing in agent lending will also enable the economic development critical to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
This report focuses on the agent lending landscape in nine diverse low- and middle-income (LMIC) countries that represent mature and evolving markets to provide insights into the larger global opportunity. These nine markets alone present a chance to lend between USD 500 million and USD 1 billion, which can grow to between USD 1.2 and USD 2.3 billion by 2027 at a CAGR of approximately 19%.
Read our report to learn how existing lending models are yet to support the Start-Work-Grow financing lifecycle of agents and dive deep into select new business models that drive innovation in the space. Also, read our highlighter note here.
With innovation and acceleration labs popping up across Asia and Africa – many of which focus on social enterprises including fintechs, agtechs, and insurtechs catering to low- and middle-income segments – we intend to look deeper into whether these labs are facilitating (through their partners) access to and usage of financial services. Our panelists will include representatives of accelerators/incubators and donors who fund these initiatives, all of whom will share their experiences and learnings from labs they manage or fund.
This session will explore theories of change that guide innovative lab design and service delivery, success metrics and measurements used to determine if innovation labs build stronger and more inclusive social enterprises and improve the financial health of the end consumer, and what the next phase of acceleration will look like for social enterprises that have graduated from innovation labs. It will be an engaging and fruitful discussion from perspectives across Asia and Africa.
MicroSave Consulting (MSC) is a boutique consulting firm that has, for 25 years, pushed the world towards meaningful financial, social, and economic inclusion. These podcast series are hosted by MSC for dedicated founders, start-ups, investors, and other stakeholders in the startup ecosystem. Through this bouquet of curated conversations around developments in the financial inclusion space, we offer insights and lessons based on our research and expertise.
In our latest podcast, Edward Obiko, Senior Manager, MSC, discusses with Anup Singh, MSC Africa Regional Director, and Richard Jabel, CEO of the Agent Banking Company, the vast opportunity to lend to cash-in cash-out (CICO) agents. Investors have an attractive opportunity to lend USD 0.5-1 billion to agents in nine diverse low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), such as Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda. This credit market is expected to grow to USD 1.2-2.3 billion by 2027.
The adverse effect that climate change is having on farmers and their farming operations cannot be disputed and includes reduced crop yield, access to nutritional food, and increased production costs. This session will touch on farmer vulnerabilities induced by climate change and whether climate resilient agriculture practices will help farmers alleviate the impact of weather-related changes. In this context we will discuss how farmers can be nudged to adopt climate smart agricultural practices. Integral to this discussion is the role that agtechs play in this dynamic, what is the business case for their services, and the barriers and opportunities they foresee as they attempt to tackle one of the most pressing development challenges of the century.
The public financial management (PFM) ecosystem facilitates digital payments from governments to its citizens (G2P payments) thereby impacting the pace of financial inclusion. A robust PFM system is, in part, the reason that the Direct Bank Transfer (DBT) scheme in India has become one of the flagship success stories of the Government of India’s digitization initiatives. During this session, we will discuss PFM systems and how the use of a smart payment system and/or just-in-time funding for social sector programs can strengthen financial inclusion, one of the SDGs, address key issues around inclusion and exclusion errors in social sector programs, and whether industry practitioners can develop replicable digital public goods for payment systems. We expect a lively discussion in which best in practice stories will be shared.
