Bill Gates: how mobile banking can change the lives of the poor
Bill Gates: how mobile banking can change the lives of the poor
2015-02-04
in the next 15 years digital banking
will bring basic financial services and
security to millions it will give the
poor more control over their assets and
help transform their lives first key
point is that banking is very important
that if you have a medical need or you
want to pay your kid school fee you need
to be able to save and plan or you need
to be able to borrow to meet that need
and if you're poor sometimes you just
can't meet the need you pull your kid
out of school that's very inefficient
let's say six months later you can put
them back in there behind you buy a cow
thinking you'll get productivity but
then you're short so you lose a lot of
money when you sell it the kind of
financial flexibility that we take for
granted in rich countries about loans
and savings once you you're getting down
and you're very poor that's not
available
part of it is that the fixed cost of ATM
machines and bank tellers and all that
means that small transactions are money
losing in the old system in the new
digital realm where we take and build a
debit card quibbling that's just your
cell phone there even 50-cent type
transactions you can have an under two
percent fee and so it starts to be
economic to Bank the very poorest
there's a need for a utility type
service that lets you move money when
you want to pay someone else pay a store
or if you want to switch your account
from Bank 1 to bank 2 and so a lot of
our work to get this low cost digital
debit card using the cell phone going is
making sure the regulator has set up the
right safeguards and that includes a
money transfer system that has very low
fees and insisting that every bank
that's licensed connect up and have
these reasonable feeds it's kind of like
phone number portability is in the
mobile space that you can switch the
carrier and not have to change that
phone number otherwise you get a lock-in
where the poorest who have less time to
pay attention may not be paying a fair
price so some of these systems that got
going early on actually don't have this
capability ignores it open as a platform
so that in in a
can come in and get this into the the
most Pro poor farm we can buy 2030
mobile banking will be so freely
available that an additional 2 billion
people will use these services
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