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Characterised by a young, poor, and isolated population with a strong need for basic financial services and fast-growing usage of mobile phones, the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) 14 islands spread over 30 million square kilometres—seemed to be a perfect place to develop mobile financial services when the Pacific Financial Inclusion Program (PFIP) started in 2008.
From then on, the project worked with regulators to improve the regulatory environment for financial services, which led to the creation of national financial inclusion task forces or microfinance units, and put financial inclusion high on the policy agenda in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, and Vanuatu. PFIP’s direct grants to private companies have also created public-private partnerships that transformed the branchless banking industry profile in the Pacific. Since 2010, thanks to PFIP, 11 branchless or mobile banking deployments have gone live in six countries.
