25/10/2017
Payments are the connective tissue of a financial system. They link payers with payees, allow governments to transact with their citizens, and connect friends and relatives in networks of financial support.
Yet roughly 2.5 billion people in the world don’t have access to a traditional bank account—77 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day. The problem is not that the poor don’t use or need financial service — studies show that they do—but that the tools which the economically disadvantaged are forced to utilize are unreliable, expensive and hard to use. As a result, they usually struggle to stitch together a patchwork of informal, often precarious arrangements to manage their financial lives. Research shows that the right financial tools at critical times can determine whether a poor household can capture an opportunity to move out of poverty, or weather a shock without being pushed deeper into poverty.