As an organisation that aims to improve the quality and availability of financial services across the developing world, its often important to remind ourselves of the impact that being financially included has on people’s lives.
This video from the Centre for Financial Inclusion does just that – it is a great visualisation of what it means to be financially included, shown through the eyes of Constance, a fictional client.
As the video states, the main barriers to financial inclusion are the high cost of existing services and their lack of availability in locations convenient to the clients. Indeed, the majority of the financially excluded live in remote rural areas, areas that banks have traditionally found hard to the traditional barriers of poor infrastructure and long distance. This is where we believe technology can make a real difference. Developments such as mobile money, smartphones, internet penetration and cloud computing offer an opportunity to leapfrog these barriers and to bring financial services to the 2.5 billion people like Constance currently unserved.