In developing economies, low-income consumers do not have access to many financial products due to both a) suppliers’ lack of will and capability to develop products and business models appropriate to serving the bottom of the pyramid and b) a number of demand-side barriers involving price, consumer awareness, and product accessibility
Low-income consumers in developing countries are generating increasing volumes of non-traditional data on their behaviors and preferences, through their use of mobile phones, their physical and mobile payments and transactions, and their retail spending, and these data are being captured, structured, and stored by a variety of institutions and organizations
Financial services providers in developed and developing countries alike have begun to structure and analyze these non-traditional data on consumer behavior and preferences to lower delivery costs, expand customer awareness, and innovate on product design and service models
In order to assess the impact of leveraging non-traditional data and advanced analytics, we examined the way in which these applications might lower the cost structures of two financial products: microloans and microinsurance. We additionally assessed the potential for these applications to facilitate the development of new types of liquidity products tied to transactions accounts
To gain granular insights in the context of a particular market, we conducted our research in Tanzania, a country with low levels of financial services penetration but where mobile money usage is relatively high and where there are enough low-income focused financial products in the market to form the basis for our analysis
Our analysis suggests that NDAA could lower delivery costs by 15% to 30% for lending and insurance products, and facilitate the development of a low-cost credit line tied to a mobile wallet: