Tag Archives: Interbank

What lies ahead for Peru’s branchless banking sector?

This post is written by Ali Gross, currently an MA student at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and an ADC intern at SBI. 

Within Latin America, Peru is generally considered a relative success with regard to expanding financial services to the poor.  In addition to a strong microfinance sector, branchless banking has grown rapidly since regulation changed in 2005 to allow banks to offer financial services through third-party agents.

Spending time working in Peru’s branchless banking industry, it became apparent that banks (particularly industry leaders like BCP, BBVA and Interbank) have much larger agent networks than MFIs and cajas municipales.  In addition to banks’ large agent networks, third-party platforms, such as GloboKasNet, have emerged to link various banks, MFIs and cajas to a common payment platform, meaning that one KasNet agent may offer services on behalf of multiple financial institutions.

In addition to the entry third-party platforms, the regulatory environment for branchless and mobile banking in Peru has been steadily improving, providing a huge opportunity for the expansion of financial services to the poor.   Until recently, regulation required new clients to open accounts in a formal bank branch, prohibiting the creation of new accounts by agents.  Recently, however, regulation changed to permit agents to open simplified accounts which have maximum account balances and low daily withdrawal limits.  Continue reading →

The Palestine Banking Services Company

This post is written by Ahmed Jadallah, SBI SME Resident Advisor, and Andrew Lake, Director of Riskfrontier Consultants. 

As it operates in a cash-dependent economy, the Palestine banking sector has been striving for the last two decades to reduce cash management costs and tackle cash movement obstacles resulting from a challenging political environment.

The banking sector is currently witnessing important shifts in Palestine, as banks started recognizing the growing viability of retail banking services due to having experienced growth in revenues and profitability. In turn, this led to the need for developing creative banking products, and adopting modern technologies for the delivery of such services to targeted existing and new consumers.

In Palestine, achieving this objective requires a joint effort to build the required infrastructure to strengthen the electronic payments industry. The mechanism proposed by SBI to achieve this strengthening is the formation of a jointly owned company, aimed at servicing the banking sector as a whole while leveraging economies of scale to reduce dependency on cash.

Continue reading →