Designing Digital Finance for Smallholders

Digital financial services offer innovative new tools for serving the world’s 475 million smallholder households—the largest client segment by livelihood of those living under $2 a day. However, a lack of understanding of the financial needs and desires of smallholders has made designing appropriate and affordable digital financial solutions challenging. Can a human-centered approach provide insights into how to design digital financial products and services for smallholders?

Financial Infrastructure Week 2015

Financial Infrastructure Week 2015 will consist of a series of plenary and break-out sessions on the topics of Payment Systems/Remittances, Credit Reporting, Secured Lending/Collateral Registries and Insolvency/Debt Resolution. During the event experts, regulators, practitioners and private sector representatives from financial services institutions, as well as the relevant advisory services providers with global expertise, will discuss the most relevant topics in their respective arenas and disseminate best practices and international standards.

Regulate alternative financing

New non-banking players are increasingly becoming a source of credit for SMEs, and while this is a positive development, there is a need to review existing regulations, reports JOY LEE.

With the emergence of alternative financing for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), there is a need for regulators to review regulatory frameworks to enable small businesses to benefit from these new financing models, say panelists at a recent SME Finance Forum on Innovative Financing for SMEs.