The monthly newsletter from the Indicus Centre for Financial Inclusion documents the latest news and views in the financial inclusion space, to provide a knowledge base that will help build understanding around how to accelerate the poor’s access to high-quality financial services.
The lead stories this month focus on bank managed agent networks for the business correspondent model. These include a) three India Focus Notes brought out by MicroSave that examine the case for banks to manage their own agent networks, the challenges that arise and the ways to effectively implement bank supervised agent networks and b) a paper on the experience in Columbia where subsidy schemes were put in to incentivise building of agent networks especially for government payments in remote locations. These papers show that there are considerable challenges to be overcome for bank managed agent networks and subsidies by the government are effective to some extent.
Lead Stories
MicroSave India Focus Notes on Bank Managed Agent Networks
Three Focus Notes by MicroSave: No. 101 examines the case for bank managed agent networks, No. 102 puts forth the challenges for the banks in managing such networks while No. 103 explores how to effectively implement a bank supervised agent network.
A blog post in CGAP giving insights from the experience in Columbia which had three subsidy schemes to incentivize payment providers to build their agent networks in challenging locations. While public sector banks took the lead, private banks held out initially in participating in these schemes but became interested over time once scale built up.
Section I: Policy – the latest from India’s policymakers
