Credit Union's Tech Mashup

This week the World Council of Credit Unions released its latest technical guide, “Using Mobile Technology to Expand Financial Inclusion: The Credit Union Experience,” which serves as a helpful perspective on the ways that a variety of technologies are being leveraged to expand financial inclusion. In addition to bringing attention to the important (and all-too-often underappreciated) role that Credit Unions play in banking the unbanked, the report also does a great job of illustrating how a variety of technologies are being used in coordination to further the goal of helping poor households to more safely and cheaply manage their money.

Over the past month, the Global Assets Project has been analyzing the payment infrastructure that can be utilized to provide government to person payments to benefits of social protection programs. The two heat maps we’ve released thus far, on Payment Infrastructure and Payment Infrastructure Utilization, give an overview of the tools that governments have at their disposal to save money and fight corruption with the transfer to electronic payments and help beneficiaries graduate from poverty with financial inclusion.

As the report outlines, Smartphones help credit union field officers more efficiently and transparently enroll customers and record financial transactions such as balance inquiries, deposits and withdrawals in real time. In many locales, credit unions install point-of-sale devices in local merchants’ shops, which enable clients to access financial services more than just whenever their communities are visited by local agents. Personal mobile phones extend services even more, as clients can access their accounts 24 hours a day, or at least whenever they have coverage and a charged unit.

In their own way, each of these mobile technologies play an important role in credit unions, banks, governments and donors’ efforts to promote financial inclusion. As the Global Savings and Social Protecion's upcoming policy paper on payment infrastructure will discuss in greater detail, the relative importance and usefulness of each will depend importantly on country, context and geography.