Lack of proximity has long been identified as an obstacle to sustained take-up – and sustained use – of formal financial services. Through this decade, funding and specialist skillsets have been deployed to more fully scope the problem. Public bodies have also kept proximity on their agenda, urging banks to open branches in rural districts, adapting regulatory provisions for second- and third-tier rural finance providers and, more recently, creating space for innovative digital finance solutions.
Efforts by financial service providers to address the 'proximity gap' however, have been hampered by a shortage of useful, practical information on how to close it. This report outlines both the challenges and some possible ways forward.
This paper provides an overview of how agents are an essential component of delivering customer value to excluded populations such as informal savers. Based on the experiences of financial ser…
A new case study report from Scale2Save looks at how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed bank customer behaviour in Africa. The study shows that customers have increased their borrowing from fr…
In this report, we explore how BRACED projects support the development and delivery of tailored-to-context financial services. We also assess to what extent these projects are integrated withi…