FINANCE, DATA, AND TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS FOR AN EQUITABLE WORLD

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Areas of Expertise

Highlights

Event recap - Senior Social Science Researcher, Ben Mazzotta, introduces Frida - a financial health chatbot- at the FLII Conference in Mérida, Mexico on February 20.

The FinnSalud project debuted its web-based financial health chatbot that engages users and provides them with a personal financial health score, including feedback and follow-up information. Speakers shared insights from the project and chatbot-obtained aggregate data to spark a conversation about the measurement tool and its potential relevance for startups, investors and others seeking to have a positive and measurable impact on customers’ financial lives. Frida is soon launching to the general public, so sign up for updates!

Catalyst Fund Announces New Commitment

LONDON, UK, 20th January, 2020 - Catalyst Fund, managed by BFA Global and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), announced a new £12 million GBP ($15 million USD) commitment from UK Aid and J.P. Morgan to advance financial inclusion for underserved people across the world. Over the next three years, the inclusive fintech accelerator will support the growth of 30 additional startups across five key emerging markets for fintech innovation: Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, India, and Mexico.

Webinar - The Future of Work in Africa: Meet the iWorkers

Join our webinar and panel discussion as we share insights from our most recent diagnostic report on the iWorker phenomenon in Ghana and highlight insights for policymakers to encourage the emergence of iWork and positive outcomes for the future of work in Africa.

Report - Thought Leadership

Our Founder and Chair, David Porteous, reflects on the implications of superplatforms on financial inclusion in a new FIBR briefing report - "Revisiting superplatforms and their implications".

Services

We provide an innovative mix of research, insight, and services across a broad range of topics important to our clients, using finance and technology to craft digital solutions at the frontier that empower individuals, organizations, and communities to improve lives and create a more sustainable and equitable world.

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Our Portfolio

 

We leverage the opportunities created by a rapidly digitizing global economy, deploying our unique multi-disciplinary, nimble, client-centric approach to execute a range of projects combining financial tools, user-centered design, information, policy, and technology to characterize their challenges and design responses.

The RegTech for Regulators Accelerator

In the increasingly complex and digital financial world, the RegTech for Regulators Accelerator (R2A) partners with global standard setting bodies, leading financial sector authorities, and tech vendors across the globe to unlock the potential of new technologies and data science to re-engineer market supervision, regulation and policy analysis.

FinnSalud

The FinnSalud Project will develop a set of standards together with a measurement tool that will help better align consumer financial health with provider ROI, ensuring that financial products and channels are designed in a way that enhances the financial health of both customers and financial actors.

The FIBR Project

The Financial Inclusion on Business Runways (FIBR) Project, a partnership between BFA Global and Mastercard Foundation in Africa, was created with the vision to digitize the informal economy through micro and small enterprises (MSEs) using smartphones.

The OPTIX Project

BFA Global, MetLife Foundation, and RPA co-created the OPTIX project in 2015 to help financial institutions better understand the lives and needs of low-income customers and offer a portfolio of products and tools that improve their financial health. Financial institutions worldwide are striving to tailor solutions that improve the lives of low-income households and also make good business sense.

China: Helping Aggregators Reduce Greater Exclusion (CHARGE Phase 1)

Working with a local partner to design feasible aggregators models to help financially excluded customers in China to use financial services provided by superplatforms. We worked with the Chinese Academy of Financial Inclusion (CAFI) to design and establish local aggregator models in the next 2.5 years to help 200,000 financially excluded customers to gain access to financial services provided by the superplatforms.

Catalyst Fund

Catalyst Fund is a global inclusive fintech accelerator supporting early-stage startups who are building innovative solutions designed to reach the world's 3 billion underserved.

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Improving Financial Health of Low-Income People

The Optix Project in Bangladesh, Mexico, and Vietnam

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Insights

How to design PAYGo operational models to improve repayment

There has been a lot of work exploring why some pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) solar customers stop paying after they are initially granted a loan, most of which has focused on the customer and challenges they encounter, for example, short-term cash flow … Continue reading →

Why our money is on this Brazilian female fintech founder: meet Monica of Grão

    This post was co-authored by Malika Anand and Thea Sokolowski.   A former securities broker and two-time entrepreneur, Monica Saccarelli was the first female partner at Brazilian brokerage house Link Investimentos. Today, she is CEO of savings platform … Continue reading →

The Gig is Up FIBR x Quartz Podcast Series

The Gig is Up is a three-part podcast series discussing the global gig economy covering everything from the disruption of Uber and Bolt to the challenges of Jumia in Africa and the ubiquity of Amazon. It was produced in collaboration … Continue reading →

The Emergence of ‘SupTech’ — And How it Can Move Past the Experimentation Stage

“Suptech” is a word you’re likely to hear more about in the coming years. The term is a newfangled portmanteau of “supervisory” and “technology” that describes innovation in financial supervision. The application of Big Data techniques and Artificial Intelligence (AI) … Continue reading →

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