Microfinance Podcast

Michael McCaffrey, Financial Inclusion Technical Specialist, Pacific Financial Inclusion Program (PFIP), talks about the specific challenges of improving financial inclusion in remote island states. He shares the PFIP experience with mobile banking and explains how commercial banks can help improve the financial infrastructure.

Bob Christen, Director, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. talks about the strategic focus on savings. The successful mobilization of small-scale savings requires dramatic reductions of transaction costs. Mobile banking and electronic payment platforms play a central role in this process.
The foundation also fosters the development of additional products such as microinsurance.

Evelyn Stark, Senior Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation talks about the importance of marketing in successful mobile-money deployments.

Microfinance Podcast wishes you success in all your micro, small and large projects in 2011!

Clara Veniard, Associate Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, talks about a bank-led agent model where the customer proposition and the channel are controlled by the bank. 

Clara Veniard, Associate Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, talks about a bank-led agent model where the customer proposition and the channel are controlled by the bank. 

Ignacio Mas, Deputy Director, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, talks about stores acting as cash merchants and their basic need to periodically rebalance their cash and e-money holdings. He explains the basic options for doing so, including going to a bank branch.

Daniel Radcliffe, Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, describes how retail payment systems can reach a critical mass of customers.

Daniel Radcliffe, Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, talks about the fundamental factors that affect the growth and success if retail payment systems.

Amolo Ng’weno talks about M-PESA which is reaching over 12 million people at 19 million outlets. This provides amazing transaction rails for other services.

Tamara Cook talks about one of the partners of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Opportunity International Bank of Malawi, as an example of how banks have moved beyond branches to try to solve the problems that they faced of reducing costs and reaching people where they lived.

“Today we have a historic opportunity to use mobile phones to solve two major problems that bankers faced for generations: how do you get the cost of serving clients down, and how do you reach people who leave far from the branch.” Tamara Cook, Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Increasing competition amongst financial institutions in Bangladesh has given clients many options to choose from. But competition has brought with itself distortions in delivery systems, stress, and over indebtedness among clients. Preparing for managing delinquency has thus been the priority for many service providers.
Stuart Rutherford is the founder of SafeSave, a microfinance institution in Bangladesh and author of the books The Poor And Their Money and Portfolios Of The Poor. Rutherford talks about the competition in Bangladesh, delinquency management, and key challenges in addressing it.

Listening to clients is at the heart of providing financial services in a market-led approach. Financial service providers should always keep their eyes and ears open for what their clients are saying in terms of the design and delivery of the product.
Stuart Rutherford is the founder of SafeSave, a microfinance institution in Bangladesh and author of the books The Poor And Their Money and Portfolios Of The Poor. Rutherford talks about the importance of listening to clients, how best MFIs can learn from them, and his experience in conducting such research.

Roger Voorhies, Founder and Former CEO, OIBM talks about the bank’s institution building, the bank’s experience with technology - cards, m-banking, ATMs, and whether the OIBM experience can be replicated in other regions.

Roger Voorhies talks about the biggest challenges and natural advantages of doing microfinance in Africa. He also introduces the history of OIBM, one of the leading microfinance banks on the continent. 

Mark Schreiner, Director, Microfinance Risk Management talks about the future of poverty scoring and gives examples of how MFIs use this powerful tool.

Mark Schreiner, Director, Microfinance Risk Management explains where a score card comes from, what are the challenges of implementing the system, and how one trains analysts.

Mark Schreiner, Director, Microfinance Risk Management talks about the poverty scoring as a way for microlenders to measure how poor their clients are in a quantitative way and why funders could be interested in poverty scoring.

Michael McCord, President, MicroInsurance Centre, LLC  talks about the factors that push the growth of microinsurance, the evolution of products and the biggest challenge in microinsurance.