Is Mobile Money Killing Off the Group Microfinance Model (And Would That Be Such a Bad Thing)?

Photo by UN SG’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance via Flickr.

In the summer of 2017, SAJIDA Foundation, an NGO and microfinance provider in Bangladesh, made a bold decision — it was going to make an entire branch of about 1,600 clients (or members, as SAJIDA calls them) cashless. Rather than attending group meetings to make microloan repayments in person, these members would show up at a mobile money (MM) agent and make their payments through a bill-pay option at a time and place convenient for them. Going cashless meant that in one fell swoop, digital financial services (DFS) would make group meetings, the locus of traditional microcredit for decades, redundant.

What follows is the story of redefining group meetings in a world of increasingly digitized microfinance, largely based on a renewed appreciation of the non-pecuniary roles these meetings perform. This is the first of a series of pieces in which BFA will track SAJIDA’s journey over the coming months as it digitizes its operations and goes cashless. 

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Mobile Money Meets Microcredit: Three Key Decisions in Taking a Concept from Design to Pilot

Photo courtesy of SAJIDA Foundation

In a previous blog post, we were introduced to how SAJIDA Foundation in Bangladesh is using evidence from data analytics, business case analysis and client research to improve cross-selling as part of the OPTIX project. SAJIDA competes with numerous microfinance institutions by providing relatively similar credit and savings products to support low-income clients. In this post, we discuss three key evidence-based programmatic decisions that were necessary to take a new mobile financial service (MFS)-based microfinance initiative from the design table to pilot testing in the field starting August 2016. This initiative enables SAJIDA to disburse loans directly into bKash accounts of its members, allows members to make loan repayments and deposit savings from their mobile wallets, and is being piloted in five branches with rather varied profiles. These observations are made from the point of view of staff at Bankable Frontier Associates who have been intimately involved with SAJIDA since the inception of OPTIX.

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Mobile Money Meets Microcredit: Creating an Evidence-Based Cross-Sell Strategy

Financial institutions, including those serving low-income clients, regularly turn to cross-selling to engage clients, but do not always consider the particular needs of the clients themselves.

Some institutions hold an inherent assumption that certain products should be “good” for clients. However, because such assumptions are not always backed by hard data or client insights, these institutions may offer products that are not relevant enough, leaving the products unused by clients and expensive for institutions.

What does it take to enhance clients’ engagement and encourage them to actively use multiple products with an institution over time?

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