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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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