Mobile money helps bridge the access to finance gender gap
According to the World Bank, receiving digital payments of any kind, catalyzes the use of other financial services, such as storing, saving, and borrowing money. Despite the uptake, only 32% of women and 40% of men in developing countries received an electronic payment.
AdVision Finance designs and implements strategies for financial institutions to improve their service coverage in rural areas of developing countries.
SME Finance Forum
"Over 40% of micro businesses have unmet financing needs"
These figures are provided by the SME Finance Forum and highlights the persisting financing gap in developing countries. Mobile money is an effective instrument to help decrease this gap. As not everybody is digital literate or owns digital devices, physical bank presence is needed. This need is especially true in countries where an important part of micro businesses are located in rural areas where financial institutions struggle with operating efficiently.
Case Study
Prototyping and development of digital apps for NBS Bank Malawi
NBS Bank, a fully-fledged bank in Malawi, wanted to use digital tools to increase its service penetration in rural areas of Malawi. Through a Gap assessment we understood where the bank stands today and it identified several opportunities where digital instruments can make a significant breakthrough in market penetration.
Together with the Bank’s management, we conducted priority workshops to prioritize digital projects to be launched. This led to prototyping of two digital solutions:
- A customer onboarding application allows credit specialist to faster onboard new customers as well as provide potential clients the opportunity to become a client without involving NBS staff.
- An agency banking application to be used by MSME partners of the bank to increase mobile money availability in Malawi. Through this application, they can develop their activities as an NBS agent, while generating income for the partner and increasing outreach of the banks services.
The applications were designed with the aid of Rabobank’s User Experience design team. Both applications were prototyped and tested with real customers, in line with design sprint methodologies.
As a result of the project, it was decided to Develop here the results of the project.....
As an additional service, AdVision Finance together with its technology partner Planton Solutions, Moldova - designed, developed and implemented a transaction and accounts reconciliation application (www.reconwizz.com) which helped NBS reconcile their records between the different applications used in the organization.
