A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
To promote effective regulation of branchless banking, especially mobile banking, CGAP, DFID, and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) have organized the third Global Leadership Seminar for high-level policymakers and regulators who set policy for branchless banking, including mobile banking. CGAP’s Technology Program and AFI are supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This week we’re blogging from the seminar, where the conversation has focused on technology, but also business models and especially distribution networks. A session on banking agents was chaired by Ignacio Mas of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The broad consensus was that agents (so far) have not created significant risks for consumers or the soundness of any banking system among the countries where agents are doing cash-in cash out transactions.
It is easy to slip into a shorthand vocabulary when dealing with a technical issue like mobile banking. Is that a challenge when we talk about agents?
For me, the key word is distribution. That’s the main problem we are trying to solve. It means two things. First, getting services closer to the customers – proximity. The second is being able to conduct smaller transactions affordably. Those two together are a basic enabler to serve poor people. Solving the problem of distribution is solving a business case and getting closer to the customers with the ability to do small transactions. In general, the broad solution to us seems to be to take banking transactions outside of traditional bank infrastructure, which is why I prefer to say that we are seeking “banking beyond branches” rather than “branchless banking.” Branchless banking cannot work without branches. The small store doing cash-in/cash-out transactions still has to go somewhere to get rid of the excess cash – and that’s usually a bank branch. So it actually isn’t branchless at all. The objective is to create outlets for people to transact in every town and village.
There’s been a lot written about distribution networks and banking the unbanked. How did you try to advance the conversation?
Now that we have some history of transacting through every-day retail outlets, it was a good opportunity to ask about the actual history of risks that has transpired from that experience. The panelists agreed that fraud cases have been very few, and that consumer protection issues reported have also been few, perhaps the salient one being the availability of cash at agents. That creates an issue of the convenience of the service, but not a fundamental risk to the system. Another hotly debated topic was whether regulations should allow agents to be exclusive (where there’s a proprietary network), nonexclusive (where agents can work for several services) or whether they should be silent (let the market decide) on this point. I personally don’t see much reason why they couldn’t transact from their bank accounts with multiple banks to service more customers in their communities. The exact legal relationship between the outlet and the banks would depend on how risks are addressed.
What are the common ingredients for successful regulation of agent banking? Is there a prescription?
The exact legal relationship between an agent (the outlet) and the bank depends on how risks are addressed. By eliminating all credit risk you don’t need to have a contractual framework between the bank and the retail outlet to address financial risks. The real goal here is to ensure that a customer can conduct a cash-in/cash-out transaction at a store without having to actually trust that store. Two things must happen for this to be possible. The first is that the customer’s transaction is settled against the bank account of the store itself. The second is that there is real-time authorization to ensure that all transactions are properly funded from either the customer’s account or the store’s account, depending on whether the they are doing a deposit or a withdrawal.
What about consumer protection?
It’s important to separate the financial risks from consumer protection risks. There may be implied agency if the bank puts its logo in a store, but that goes to consumer protection issues and not financial risks. Consumer issues should be handled by a contract between banks and outlets, that deal with aspects such as disclosure, communication of redress mechanism, etc. That contract should be linked to the use of a bank logo / branding in retail environments – it’s the act of putting the bank brand that raises consumer protection issues because customers may reasonably expect that transacting at the store is like transacting at the branch.
You asked policymakers in your session what their backup plan might be should agent banking not actually push the envelope of financial inclusion. What is yours?
If this approach doesn’t work, then we will have to continue developing community-based microfinance which, though much less scalable, has been quite effective in meeting customer needs where such organizations have been established. However, banking beyond branches still looks to be the most promising option. If there is toothpaste in any corner shop in the world, why would we not succeed in putting transactional services (which don’t even require physical delivery of goods) in those same shops?
-Ignacio Mas, as told to Jim Rosenberg
Previously: - TigerText: an iPhone app that sends SMS that won't linger
emilyTo promote effective regulation of branchless banking, especially mobile banking, CGAP, DFID, and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) have organized the third Global Leadership Seminar for high-level policymakers and regulators who set policy for branchless banking, including mobile banking. CGAP’s Technology Program and AFI are supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This week we’re blogging from the seminar. One session on branchless banking from the consumer’s point of view (download the presentation here) was chaired by Daryl Collins, a Senior Associate at Bankable Frontiers and co – author of the influential Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day. The book draws on year-long surveys of financial diaries from families in Bangladesh, India and South Africa. The surprise conclusion: many of the people they tracked were not living hand-to-mouth. Rather, the poor often rely on a variety of complex tactics and tools to manage money. In preparation for the session, Daryl reviewed household survey data from Brazil and Kenya - what experiences the poor have had with branchless banking and how this might inform the choices that regulators make when it comes to branchless banking. This is the second part of a two-part interview I conducted with her.
How are consumer experiences with branchless banking driving the policy debate?
What we are trying to do is to talk about the evidence on the ground. A lot of times what drives policy is perception – through the media, what people may hear about rather than systematic evidence. So we conducted a bespoke survey on correspondence banking in Brazil and looked at an exsisting surveyon M-PESA to look at the incidence with which the poor have problems with branchless banking.
So is branchless banking a problem when it comes to consumer protection?
Not based on what we’ve seen. The surveys show that the incidence of problems is not as high as we thought, especially when you compare to other types of outlets, for example ATMs. In Brazil we found there was a lot of use of correspondence agents, especially to pay bills, and that those were used mostly by people who could be considered vulnerable, with low levels of literacy and income. We don’t see transactions happening at agents going wrong any more often than at other places, for example at an ATM or in a bank branch. We found no real difference when it comes to availability of cash - for agents vs. for ATMs.
Where is there room for improvement?
What we really see is that when something does go wrong, people don’t know how to seek redress for the problem. In those instances, a relatively high number of people didn’t do anything because they didn’t know what to do or didn’t think anything could be done.
That’s Brazil. What about Kenya?
According to a 2008 FSD Kenya survey on M-PESA, people are using M-PESA mostly to send remittances. M-PESA really drowns out the other ways of sending money. What is surprising about M-PESA is that people reported incredibly little loss of funds on both remitting money and saving with M-PESA. Only 1 in 100 M-PESA savers lost money as opposed to 5 in 100 losing money in savings clubs. The incidence of loss is really minimal. More importantly, those who have lower levels of income and literacy aren’t having any more problems than the less vulnerable.
What is the key takeaway for the people who make the rules?
It is the job of regulators to worry about what could go wrong - are there risks for vulnerable poor people? There’s nothing in our results that should present a red light for branchless banking. Rather, in those rare instances where things go wrong, it needs to be made more clear to the customer what her rights are, how to seek help. It’s more about a type of financial education. A lot of consumers are today getting services from formal institutions and don’t know how to complain or get a problem solved.
-Daryl Collins, as told to Jim Rosenberg
IBM and two Indo-Japanese academic outfits have planned to develop a mobile phone for the illiterate, blind, deaf and elderly people. The device will use open source software and other materials developed will be made publicly available to allow the governments and businesses around the world to take advantage of the technology.
A consortium has been set up to explore an open, common user interface platform for mobile devices, to make them easier to use for disadvantaged populations around the world. The group is made up of IBM, the National Institute of Design (NID) of India and Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo (RCAST). Full report.
Ushahidi’s blog has a great post on the development of a tech toolbox for election monitoring. Unsurprisingly, it is anchored to the use of Ushahidi as a platform for election monitoring, which has been used quite effectively in India amongst other places.
Through the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV), I introduced Web 2.0 and mapping to election monitoring in Sri Lanka around two years ago, realising at the time that the visualisation of election violence and real time monitoring could help media and civil society hold members of political parties and their supporters more accountable for their actions.
There is no other election monitoring agency in the country that uses maps, the web, or Facebook, in a comparable manner and the Government Department of Elections website remains stuck in the 90’s.
Writing in 2009 on the challenge of using new media for election monitoring, I noted that,
Right now, there’s no escaping the labour required for the task – each location and incident is entered into the map directly, no automated source from the web is used to populate maps. Helps us give as close to a real time image of the ground situation in the lead up to and on the day of election, more useful we are told by extensive feedback from local media, than a mashup that just puts unverified reports on a map along with other data streams.
At the time I started to work on using web media for election monitoring, and even today, the installation, configuration and customisation of Ushahidi requires a level of technical expertise that is well beyond every single election monitoring NGO I know of in Sri Lanka. It is therefore not easy to promote or use the system without a sufficient budget to get help in localising it and for staff training. Further, short code SMS’s for purposes of election monitoring are very hard to negotiate with all mobile service providers, given the risk averse nature of these business to monitoring that obviously clearly targets political parties including those which constitute government.
With these limitations in mind, I used the following set of tools to undergird CMEV’s monitoring operations, which continue to date.
Video
I use the Vimeo channel of the Centre for Policy Alternatives to host videos shot using a Flip Mino HD. The Flip records very high quality video, which I process and edit using iMovie on my Mac, saving it in a lower resolution before uploading it to Vimeo using its relatively new (and still buggy) Adobe Air based uploader. I have been forced to use YouTube (e.g. this video) when on the day of an election, Vimeo has temporarily halted uploading and site functionality for routine maintenance.
There is a high degree of interest in these videos. For example, 4 videos uploaded to the CMEV site during the course of the Presidential election day on 26 January 2010 were viewed over 1,400 times.
Mapping
From the get-go, I used Google Maps because of its ease of use and rich feature set. Two years ago, Google Maps didn’t have any of the street level information for key cities it now features. I used a laborious technique of getting lat / long data from one map via Google and entering this into the election monitoring map to plot incidents in cities and towns. Today, this process is made much faster and easier with the street level information that was first featured in 2009.
I have manually plotted well over 1,500 incidents over four elections since 2008, including Sri Lanka’s first post-war Presidential election earlier this year.
For each election, I have created two maps – one plotting election violence leading up to election day, and another plotting election violence on election day.
The map plotting election violence on the day of the Presidential election held on 26 January 2010 has been viewed nearly 26,000 times to date, proving my hunch that information visualised on Google Maps would be in high demand.
Plotting election violence on Google Maps also allows for new forms of advocacy against election violence through the visualisation of patterns and perpetrators, such as A map of shame: Clustering cities and regions with very high levels of election violence.
Backend
I had used WordPress for years, and when CPA’s own website in its previous avatar became too laborious to hold all the information the monitoring was generating, I created a new blog to be the hub for CMEV’s information dissemination. All the while, I kept in mind how CMEV could continue operations even if WordPress temporarily went down during a critical phase of monitoring.
CMEV’s website now holds all of its election monitoring reports, field reports, videos, podcasts and maps, with links to archived material on CPA’s own website.
Podcasts
I recorded all the podcasts in elections before 2010 using my Mac’s in built speaker, which was good enough for the job. I wasn’t aiming for broadcast quality in these recordings, but a clarity good enough to get the message across. I edited the podcasts using my Mac’s GarageBand, adding for example an intro and extro to give it a touch of professional flair.
For the Presidential Election in 2010, we did something completely new and revolutionary in Sri Lanka, using drop.io’s voice mail feature to record election monitoring updates via mobile phones. For the cost of a call to the US, we were able to use mobile phones to give out timely updates that media was able to use as well. As noted on the CMEV site and all of our press releases on election day,
These updates can be downloaded as MP3s for broadcast, listened to online, embedded on any website and social networking platform, emailed or easily linked to. Special incidents will also be covered in these updates, and to help reduce the burden on our monitors, journalists are strongly encouraged to use this feed as their primary channel of regular soundbites from CMEV.
At the time of writing, over 450 had listened to these podcasts.
Drop.io came into its own when on the day of election, just before polls closed, there was a serious question over the eligibility of a leading candidate. I was able to use Skype to record an interview with a leading constitutional lawyer (and friend) and immediately feature it on the drop.io channel for media to pick up on and use to dispel rumours and propaganda.
Social networking
CMEV is the only election monitoring agency to have a presence on Facebook and give out updates using its Twitter feed. But it is not only through CMEV’s Twitter feed that I have given critical updates during elections.
On the 27th of January, I tweeted on Groundviews from 3am throughout the day giving updates that at the time were some of the first eye witness reports on the situation unfolding on the ground, and served to dispel false rumours to boot. My article, Updates capturing aftermath of presidential elections, is a detailed look at how Twitter aided election monitoring and reporting and how its use by Groundviews was unprecedented in Sri Lankan media to report on, what was at the time, a very disturbing situation on the ground.
Photos
Instead of using a custom CMS or uploading them to WordPress, I opted to use Flickr to catalogue CMEV’s photo documentation of election violence and its work. This aspect of CMEV’s work need to be strengthened, but the photos received from the field are all catalogued here, and embedded as appropriate on CMEV’s WordPress blog (often linked to CMEV’s press releases).
Of course, that I haven’t or can’t use the tools mentioned in Ushahidi’s blog post, including the Ushahidi platform itself, is no reflection on their ability to efficiently nod effectively support election monitoring processes. It’s just that in the absence of any funding, and with my limited technical knowledge, I have almost single-handedly demonstrated in Sri Lanka without the use of any of these tools that the violence of political parties and some politicians in particular can be mapped and archived for posterity, to be leveraged by concerned citizens in civil society in on-going agitations for greater democracy.
But is technology alone enough? Even if all these tools and those in Ushahidi’s blog are used, it is any guarantee of a better, more transparent and accountable electoral process and democracy? As I note in Mapping violence during elections and voter education, albeit from a Sri Lankan perspective,
… unless awareness campaigns before an election, and advocacy campaigns after which bring to light, including name and shame, perpetrators of elections violence, these exercises alone, including my own, have little chance of really strengthening democracy. The problem with raising awareness before an election is that NGOs can never match the reach of an incumbent government’s propaganda, or even that of a political party, both of which have vested interests in keeping the public ignorant about the history of candidates and their violence.
The problem with post-election advocacy is that placing the violence of winners in public scrutiny will almost always be (a) seen as a conspiracy to undermine the legitimacy of their victory (b) cast as a rival party political bid to discredit the electoral victory and the ‘will of the people’ (c) be seen as some sort of NGO / civil society campaign to discredit the winners.
Technology alone then is no guarantee of cleaner elections. But technology can be part of the solution.
0.000000 0.000000Ushahidi’s blog has a great post on the development of a tech toolbox for election monitoring. Unsurprisingly, it is anchored to the use of Ushahidi as a platform for election monitoring, which has been used quite effectively in India amongst other places.
Through the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV), I introduced Web 2.0 and mapping to election monitoring in Sri Lanka around two years ago, realising at the time that the visualisation of election violence and real time monitoring could help media and civil society hold members of political parties and their supporters more accountable for their actions.
There is no other election monitoring agency in the country that uses maps, the web, or Facebook, in a comparable manner and the Government Department of Elections website remains stuck in the 90’s.
Writing in 2009 on the challenge of using new media for election monitoring, I noted that,
Right now, there’s no escaping the labour required for the task – each location and incident is entered into the map directly, no automated source from the web is used to populate maps. Helps us give as close to a real time image of the ground situation in the lead up to and on the day of election, more useful we are told by extensive feedback from local media, than a mashup that just puts unverified reports on a map along with other data streams.
At the time I started to work on using web media for election monitoring, and even today, the installation, configuration and customisation of Ushahidi requires a level of technical expertise that is well beyond every single election monitoring NGO I know of in Sri Lanka. It is therefore not easy to promote or use the system without a sufficient budget to get help in localising it and for staff training. Further, short code SMS’s for purposes of election monitoring are very hard to negotiate with all mobile service providers, given the risk averse nature of these business to monitoring that obviously clearly targets political parties including those which constitute government.
With these limitations in mind, I used the following set of tools to undergird CMEV’s monitoring operations, which continue to date.
Video
I use the Vimeo channel of the Centre for Policy Alternatives to host videos shot using a Flip Mino HD. The Flip records very high quality video, which I process and edit using iMovie on my Mac, saving it in a lower resolution before uploading it to Vimeo using its relatively new (and still buggy) Adobe Air based uploader. I have been forced to use YouTube (e.g. this video) when on the day of an election, Vimeo has temporarily halted uploading and site functionality for routine maintenance.
There is a high degree of interest in these videos. For example, 4 videos uploaded to the CMEV site during the course of the Presidential election day on 26 January 2010 were viewed over 1,400 times.
Mapping
From the get-go, I used Google Maps because of its ease of use and rich feature set. Two years ago, Google Maps didn’t have any of the street level information for key cities it now features. I used a laborious technique of getting lat / long data from one map via Google and entering this into the election monitoring map to plot incidents in cities and towns. Today, this process is made much faster and easier with the street level information that was first featured in 2009.
I have manually plotted well over 1,500 incidents over four elections since 2008, including Sri Lanka’s first post-war Presidential election earlier this year.
For each election, I have created two maps – one plotting election violence leading up to election day, and another plotting election violence on election day.
The map plotting election violence on the day of the Presidential election held on 26 January 2010 has been viewed nearly 26,000 times to date, proving my hunch that information visualised on Google Maps would be in high demand.
Plotting election violence on Google Maps also allows for new forms of advocacy against election violence through the visualisation of patterns and perpetrators, such as A map of shame: Clustering cities and regions with very high levels of election violence.
Backend
I had used WordPress for years, and when CPA’s own website in its previous avatar became too laborious to hold all the information the monitoring was generating, I created a new blog to be the hub for CMEV’s information dissemination. All the while, I kept in mind how CMEV could continue operations even if WordPress temporarily went down during a critical phase of monitoring.
CMEV’s website now holds all of its election monitoring reports, field reports, videos, podcasts and maps, with links to archived material on CPA’s own website.
Podcasts
I recorded all the podcasts in elections before 2010 using my Mac’s in built speaker, which was good enough for the job. I wasn’t aiming for broadcast quality in these recordings, but a clarity good enough to get the message across. I edited the podcasts using my Mac’s GarageBand, adding for example an intro and extro to give it a touch of professional flair.
For the Presidential Election in 2010, we did something completely new and revolutionary in Sri Lanka, using drop.io’s voice mail feature to record election monitoring updates via mobile phones. For the cost of a call to the US, we were able to use mobile phones to give out timely updates that media was able to use as well. As noted on the CMEV site and all of our press releases on election day,
These updates can be downloaded as MP3s for broadcast, listened to online, embedded on any website and social networking platform, emailed or easily linked to. Special incidents will also be covered in these updates, and to help reduce the burden on our monitors, journalists are strongly encouraged to use this feed as their primary channel of regular soundbites from CMEV.
At the time of writing, over 450 had listened to these podcasts.
Drop.io came into its own when on the day of election, just before polls closed, there was a serious question over the eligibility of a leading candidate. I was able to use Skype to record an interview with a leading constitutional lawyer (and friend) and immediately feature it on the drop.io channel for media to pick up on and use to dispel rumours and propaganda.
Social networking
CMEV is the only election monitoring agency to have a presence on Facebook and give out updates using its Twitter feed. But it is not only through CMEV’s Twitter feed that I have given critical updates during elections.
On the 27th of January, I tweeted on Groundviews from 3am throughout the day giving updates that at the time were some of the first eye witness reports on the situation unfolding on the ground, and served to dispel false rumours to boot. My article, Updates capturing aftermath of presidential elections, is a detailed look at how Twitter aided election monitoring and reporting and how its use by Groundviews was unprecedented in Sri Lankan media to report on, what was at the time, a very disturbing situation on the ground.
Photos
Instead of using a custom CMS or uploading them to WordPress, I opted to use Flickr to catalogue CMEV’s photo documentation of election violence and its work. This aspect of CMEV’s work need to be strengthened, but the photos received from the field are all catalogued here, and embedded as appropriate on CMEV’s WordPress blog (often linked to CMEV’s press releases).
Of course, that I haven’t or can’t use the tools mentioned in Ushahidi’s blog post, including the Ushahidi platform itself, is no reflection on their ability to efficiently nod effectively support election monitoring processes. It’s just that in the absence of any funding, and with my limited technical knowledge, I have almost single-handedly demonstrated in Sri Lanka without the use of any of these tools that the violence of political parties and some politicians in particular can be mapped and archived for posterity, to be leveraged by concerned citizens in civil society in on-going agitations for greater democracy.
But is technology alone enough? Even if all these tools and those in Ushahidi’s blog are used, it is any guarantee of a better, more transparent and accountable electoral process and democracy? As I note in Mapping violence during elections and voter education, albeit from a Sri Lankan perspective,
… unless awareness campaigns before an election, and advocacy campaigns after which bring to light, including name and shame, perpetrators of elections violence, these exercises alone, including my own, have little chance of really strengthening democracy. The problem with raising awareness before an election is that NGOs can never match the reach of an incumbent government’s propaganda, or even that of a political party, both of which have vested interests in keeping the public ignorant about the history of candidates and their violence.
The problem with post-election advocacy is that placing the violence of winners in public scrutiny will almost always be (a) seen as a conspiracy to undermine the legitimacy of their victory (b) cast as a rival party political bid to discredit the electoral victory and the ‘will of the people’ (c) be seen as some sort of NGO / civil society campaign to discredit the winners.
Technology alone then is no guarantee of cleaner elections. But technology can be part of the solution.
Update: An election monitoring SMS template is a blog post that expands on the points here by linking to a SMS template I designed for election monitoring.
As millions of eyes were tuned to the Oscars last night, the stage was set for one man to use the massive platform for a unique SMS call-to-action, whether the show’s producers wanted him to or not.
During the acceptance speech for winning best Documentary, the subject of which, Ric O’Barry, held up a sign that read “text DOLPHIN to 44144.” Even though the camera cut away quickly, the message was still understood.
O’Barry, who captured and trained the first five dolphins who played Flipper in the popular 1960s TV series, dedicated the rest of his life to protecting and freeing dolphins from captivity after witnessing the ramifications of his actions — as well as the suicide of one of the Flipper dolphins in his arms. His life’s work was chronicled in the documentary “The Cove,” which won the Oscar last night for best documentary of the year.
Following through on the campaign and texting “Dolphin” to 44144 returned a link to an Online petition and a means to send a letter to Pres. Obama. MsgMe, the provider of the 44144 short code used in the call-to-action, said even though cameras cut away quickly when O’Barry held up the sign, the response was still significant.
“We saw steady traffic for the next five hours and have seen a huge spike in support over Twitter which we believe is generating the bulk of the traffic,” said Matt Silk of Waterfall Mobile, provider of the MsgMe SMS platform in an email today. ”New subscribers are still coming in at a pretty healthy clip to sign the petition so we are ecstatic with the viral explosion of the campaign.”
“A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to allow any illiterate or semi-literate person on first contact with a computer, to immediately know how to proceed with minimal or no assistance.
As Medhi points out, in text-based conventional information architecture found in mobile phones and PCs, there are a number of usability challenges that semi literate people face. By using a combination of voice, video and graphics in an innovative way, Medhi has overcome this challenge.
Medhi discovered the kind of barriers that illiterate populations face in using technology through an ethnographic design process involving more than 400 women from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines, and South Africa.”
Advirtek
student
Ben Freda Consulting
BizMeds
