UNCDF’s MicroLead programme team is proud to introduce its fifth digital financial services (DFS) toolkit: Create Your Own Mobile Banking Channel. This step-by-step guide, from UNCDF/MicroLead and Mastercard Foundation, is available in both French and English, and features real-world case studies of MicroLead partners Fidelity Bank in Ghana, Mwanga Community Bank and Equity Bank in Tanzania.

In this fifth model, a financial institution invests in a mobile banking platform to enable its clients to perform a range of transactions from their mobile phones. The financial institution’s own agents are used as cash-in/cash-out points. Transactions impact the core banking system (CBS) in real time and require an integration between the CBS and the mobile banking platform.

Digital finance offers a solution for the poor living in remote rural areas, where microfinance and bank branches can be hard to find. “The rural poor face logistical barriers to saving for emergencies and investments and for accessing a suitable range of formal financial services,” says Pam Eser, the Global Head of MicroLead. “Managers of financial institutions are coming to understand they can surmount these barriers by offering digital financial services, but they may not know where to begin. That’s why we created these toolkits as step-by-step guides, so managers understand their choices and how to implement them.”
The sixth and final DFS toolkit, sponsored by Mastercard Foundation and developed with support from PHB Development, will be released in November 2017. You can download all five of these step-by-step guides and their associated case studies free here: https://bit.ly/DFSToolkits

For more information on the MicroLead programme, please visit www.uncdf.org/microlead. Follow UNCDF MicroLead at @UNCDFMicroLead.