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EUROPEAN DIALOGUENnull3EUROPEAN MICROFINANCE AWARD 2018Financial Inclusion through TechnologyDigital Pathways in Financial InclusionBy Sam MendelsonWith Lucia Spaggiari, Chiara Pescatori, Gabriela Erice, Gemma Cavaliere, and Daniel Rozas Martin Jumbe UNCDFFOREWORDWere living through arguably the most dynamic period in modern history. The personal computer as we know it is less than 40 years old. The mobile phone and Internet are both barely in their mid-twenties. And the smartphone, perhaps the item with the single greatest transformative potential for the worlds poor, is appropriately enough a fast-changing and unpredictable teenager. What technology has done for the lives of richer consumers in the developed world may be nothing to what it can do for the financially excluded. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, wrote Arthur C. Clarke. How true.In the financial inclusion sector, whether this magic lives only in conference presentations or consultants slide decks, or is real, depends on a most vital link in the chain. Between the developer or engineer on the one end, and the end-user at the other, is the financial institution which can adopt a broad range of approaches to how to use the magic of technology to better serve its clients reducing costs, increasing efficiency, spreading financial literacy, and most of all offering products and services that are of genuine benefit for those who need them the most.The European Microfinance Award 2018 highlighted the ways financial services providers can integrate new technological opportunities into how they serve their clients. It sought to highlight technology-enabled services that are improving access to finance for low income and financially excluded clients. By recognising those that do it best, it hopes to promote those financial providers that offer innovative products and services capable of responding to users needs for trust, speed, low cost, security, usability, and transparency, and become standard-setters for other players in the market. This publication features the winner, finalists and semi-finalists of the 2018 Award. The top-ten applicants selected as semi-finalists represent a fast-moving landscape, which will likely bear little resemblance several years from now. Nevertheless, they are paving the way for how advances in technology can be adopted by financial services providers who serve the excluded, and will enable other providers, as well as innovators, entrepreneurs, engineers, developers and investors, to follow suit.The European Microfinance Award process is long and rigorous. It takes months of preparation by the e-MFP team to put together the application forms and material. It takes months more for the team and Selection Committee adjudicators to go through an intensive evaluation process that eventually leads to a list of semi-finalists and three finalists, from which the High Jury selects the winner. We would like to express our admiration and thanks to the Award consultants Lucia Spaggiari and Chiara Pescatori from MFR, our colleagues at InFiNe.lu, Luxembourgs Directorate for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs within the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, all the members of the Selection Committee and the High Jury. Thank you to the entire e-MFP Secretariat, which works tirelessly to put together and oversee the entire Award process each year. And finally, thanks to all 27 applicants - we wish you very well in the future.Christoph Pausch, e-MFP Executive Secretary3Foreword 3The Promises and Pitfalls of Technology 7The European Microfinance Award 2018 10Financial Inclusion through Technology 141 Increasing Institutional Efficiency ID verification technologies such as biometrics; innovations in client data management) that have a direct impact on service delivery to clients. Technology-enabled non-financial services: non-financial services delivered to clients using digital channels.10 European Microfinance Award 2018
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