Ignacio Mas – Everyone Needs a Safe Place to Save
Ignacio Mas is Deputy Director in Financial Services for the Poor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His impressive background includes degrees from Harvard and MIT and high-level positions at CGAP, interTouch (an NTT-DoCoMo Group Company), Vodafone Group, and Intel Capital–Intel Corp’s venture capital arm.
Ignacio Mas began his talk with a statement we’re probably not used to equating with survival: Everyone needs a safe place to save. By asking “How many of you have a bank account?”, he illustrated to TEDxSeattle attendees an overlooked fact—we have the luxury of an affiliation with a financial institution, in contrast to the more than 3 billion who don’t have access to a basic bank. Who are these people? They are the world’s poor who live on less than $2/day. They don’t own ATM cards or checkbooks. After all, why would one need these if they lived hand to mouth with no carry over from their last earning?
Mas brought it down to terms Seattleites could understand—coffee. On a good day, we’d earn a latte. On a not so great one—barely enough for drip. And that’s just an average. For those who aren’t guaranteed income on a daily basis, that extra $1.50 daily income means much more than the second cup of coffee we think we need in the middle of the day.
So who are these world’s poor and how do they save without a bank account? One woman in Kenya may hide her money at home. Some may participate in a rotating savings club where members of the community put a designated amount in the pot and take turns using the collection. But it’s not quite a savings when we can’t access it when we need it. What’s the incentive after you’ve had your turn?
The questions arise: Where are banks in all of this? How do we leverage existing brick and mortar institutions, banking kits and SMS banking to provide solutions to the world’s poor? The answer is simple: We need new distribution laws. Application of technology that exists today. Real time communications. Partnerships. If one can go to a local store to buy soap and rice, why can’t one also make a simple bank deposit? If the technology exists to create prepaid cellular cards in increments of $.20, surely we can do the same with financial services to meet the growing needs of the world’s poor. We definitely won’t look at our next cup of coffee the same.
–Sophia Agtarap | @sophiakristina
[...] ‘Everyone Needs a Safe Place to Save‘ talk was also very impressive, about the lack of access to banking in the poorer parts of [...]