Remittance transfers by migrants are important in the context of pro-poor financial systems.
Low-income people need financial services to save, send and receive family remittances, and to make payments such as school fees—and they need these services typically more so than they need credit.
For microfinance providers (MFPs) serving a low-income clientele in typically un-banked areas, money transfer can be an attractive proposition: to offer their clients an essential service, attract new clients, and to generate income from a fee-based product.
Some MFPs are better positioned than others to introduce such a product and make it profitable.
Course Objective:
The objective is to provide you with a foundation in remittance (money) transfers and how microfinance fits in.
The course is designed to generate an understanding of money transfer markets, products, service providers, and users. What to look for, where to find information, analytical frameworks, and what this can mean for a MFP will be part of the course.
Content:
We want to understand factors a MFP should consider if they wished to introduce or improve a money transfer product.
What are the opportunities and challenges?
For this we need an understanding of remittance and money transfers as well as of related financial services and their regulatory context.
We will look at market analysis, product attributes, business models, and capacity issues in providing money transfer services for remittances.
The role of the regulatory environment and the growing importance of technologies will be important cross-cutting topics throughout the course.
Sessions will be as follows:
topics:
Methodology
The sessions will be highly interactive with a mixture of short presentations and many facilitated discussions, partly in smaller groups. Hopefully there will also be short presentations by some of the participants (look at your preparatory work).
Case discussions of markets and of service providers will provide the opportunity to develop research questions and analytical thinking on financial services for remittances, including on the opportunities and challenges for MFPs in offering money transfer services. The material will draw on real examples.
During the course you will receive extracts from relevant data and reading materials as well as references to additional reading.
