Addressing Customer Needs - Center for Financial Inclusion ... · 4! ! Roadmap to Financial Inclusion Addressing Customer Needs September 2013 customerIcentered!organizationsdemonstrate!and!found!thatcompanies!often!had!to!reorienttheir

Addressing Customer Needs for Full Financial Inclusion

Financial Inclusion 2020 Addressing Customer Needs Working Group

September 2013

CreditReporting

FinancialCapability

ClientProtection

Addressing Customer Needs

Technology- Enabled Business Models

2 www.financialinclusion2020.org

Roadmap to Financial Inclusion Addressing Customer Needs September 2013

About the FI2020 Roadmap Working Groups

What will it take to achieve a state of full financial inclusion? In 2011, the Center for Financial Inclusion asked this question in a global survey, and over 300 practitioners gave their perspectives on the key opportunities and obstacles to financial inclusion. Based on the responses, the Center identified five priority focus areas that are key to achieving financial inclusion, which have been used as the basis for a broad consultative process toward a Roadmap to Full Financial Inclusion. Over the course of 2012 and 2013, this process engaged dozens of experts and industry participants in developing an action-‐oriented blueprint for reaching new and underserved markets. The five focus areas are:

• Addressing Customer Needs, chaired by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), focuses on deepening our understanding of client needs and translating that knowledge into practice while expanding the range of financial services available to underserved markets.

• Technology, chaired by Visa, analyzes the potential of new technology-‐intensive channels to reach new customers, lower operating costs, increase security, and diversify financial products available to low-‐income clients.

• Financial Capability, chaired by Citi, focuses on empowering clients to know their rights as consumers, and have the skills, attitudes, aspirations, and confidence to exercise those rights.

• Client Protection, chaired by the Smart Campaign, outlines steps to deepen the implementation of client protection measures for the benefit of consumers and stability of markets.

• Credit Reporting, chaired by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), promotes extending credit reporting systems in order to expand access for new clients while managing risk for financial institutions.

Each of the five working groups has crafted a roadmap that asks: What is the vision for this topic? What stands in the way of achieving the vision and where are the greatest opportunities? What are the enabling actions and corresponding actors who can advance the vision?

The Main Idea The frequent gap between access and usage of financial services arises partly from a gap in understanding and addressing the unique needs of BoP customers.

We already know a lot about financially excluded and underserved people: They lead complex financial lives, use diverse informal tools and often lack trust in formal financial institutions. These realities must shape the design, marketing and delivery of services.

For a financial service provider to become genuinely customer-centered, top decision-makers need to hear from customers regularly, and organizational purpose and operations should center on creating value for customers. This is not easy, particularly when the business case is unproven.

Supporting stakeholders can assist providers through research on customers, as well as patient capital and smart subsidies that allow providers to learn about new client segments.



I. The Case For Addressing Customer Needs More Deeply One of the drivers of financial exclusion – and thus a missed opportunity for inclusion – is a lack of understanding of the core needs, aspirations and behaviors of poor people when it comes to financial services. Financial service providers have a powerful role to play in solving problems for customers.1 Providers and product designers need deeper insights into their clients as well as the ability to translate those insights into better service offerings and sustainable business models. This roadmap highlights what it takes to systematically uncover such insights about the lives of unserved or underserved customer segments and translate them into relevant financial solutions.

The financial services industry has long been supply-‐led – offering simple, standardized products that are easy and profitable to deliver. While some financial service providers have a clear client orientation and have successfully translated that into appropriate service offerings, the industry as a whole has not fully adapted its business models to systematically meet customer needs creatively while retaining profitability. The broad range of financial service providers that can reach poor and low-‐income people either directly or through partnerships can benefit from shifting their focus from a transactional approach (i.e., selling products) to a relationship approach (i.e., addressing customer needs).

What Does it Mean to Be Customer-‐Centered and Why Does it Matter? Putting customers first ensures that value is generated from their access to a suite of financial services. That is critical for all types of providers, because it provides a competitive edge and builds customer loyalty, thus facilitating growth in market share. When providers are attuned to customer needs and know how to translate them into product offerings (new or refined), they can more easily tap new market segments. Offering a range of services helps institutions reduce risk by diversifying across products and customer segments. Not all these benefits are realized in the short-‐term, and they require institutions to have strong “muscles” with regard to governance, management, systems, and staff capacity. But providers who have a long-‐term perspective and are able to make appropriate investments stand to gain from a customer-‐centered approach. From a customer perspective, usage of more relevant services can lead to better outcomes. In a customer-‐centered approach, the customer is an actor with rights and responsibilities. As customers start engaging in a range of formal financial services, they build financial capability and reduce the perceived – or actual – risks associated with new services. Successful use builds trust and confidence in providers. Helping customers build their financial capability is a key component of customer-‐centricity (see the Roadmap on Financial Capability). It is hard work to pursue financial inclusion from a demand-‐driven perspective. The challenge is moving from good intentions and snazzy marketing about a customer-‐centered approach to implementation – and this cannot be achieved overnight. Some emerging literature on customer-‐centered organizations from all kinds of sectors, including blue chip companies, attempts to distinguish truly customer-‐centered companies within the ranks of the many companies that merely proclaim a customer focus. For instance, Booz & Company’s study on companies in North America and Europe distilled key traits that

1 While we recognize that shades of meaning exist, within this document the terms client, customer and consumer are used inter-‐changeably.



customer-‐centered organizations demonstrate and found that companies often had to reorient their operations around and align their values with the customer. The standard approach for reaching low-‐income people has historically focused on the mass delivery of simple products as a way to keep costs reasonable. Today, technologies and business model innovations allow for more tailored designs. Customer-‐centricity does not require that each institution provide all financial solutions for every type of client segment. But it does mean that customer-‐centricity in competitive markets should lead to an ecosystem of providers that offers the full suite of financial services, designed and delivered for diverse client segments. Vision The working group Addressing Customer Needs found it helpful to formulate this vision as a starting point for its deliberations: All people, including the poor, have access to a suite of quality financial services, designed with their needs and aspirations in mind, that can help them to meet their daily and lifecycle needs, build assets,

protect them from life’s storms, prepare for the future, and realize their dreams. Within this vision, providers need to ensure that poor and low-‐income people find clear value in their financial services, appreciate the ease of access and usability of the services available to them, and have trust and confidence in the providers. In this ideal state, we could imagine clients, declaring the following:

• I have options to use a full suite of financial services (savings, credit, payment, insurance, and pensions) that enable me and my family to plan our financial future and realize our dreams.

• I have access to services that address my daily needs as well as my long-‐term needs. • I have access to financial services that help me to invest in economic opportunities. • I use financial services to help protect myself and my family and to recover from setbacks. • I find that the services I use are convenient, affordable, and transparent. • I am confident that my financial services providers understand me and my changing life needs,

and they can provide me with advice and services over my lifetime. • I know that my financial services providers are reliable and will stay with me. • I have enough information and understanding of what financial services are available to me and

how they could benefit or harm me. • I trust my financial service providers and their products.

This vision gives shape to the ultimate goal of financial inclusion from the perspective of customers. It serves as a guide for what it takes to achieve complete financial solutions that provide real and lasting value to clients and sets a goal for providers to aspire to meet. Addressing customers’ needs often requires a suite of services that one provider alone might not be able to offer, while a range of providers may need to forge multiple partnerships with intermediaries, front-‐end actors and back-‐end actors to offer seamless services to customers.



II. Current Situation – Constraints and Opportunities

A. Understanding Clients – What We Already Know About Household Finance Financial services are a means to an end. For individuals, their function is to help people to better manage their economic lives day-‐to-‐day and over the course of their lives. Financial services help move money safely and efficiently over space and time. They help meet short-‐term and daily expenses, such as food and fuel, as well as major life-‐cycle goals, such as education, health, business investment, shelter, and security in old age. Financial services can help people achieve core needs and aspirations, such as smoothing cash flows so there is food on the table every day, building assets for investment in business or paying school fees, managing and mitigating risks and creating peace of mind for future planning. Understanding the role of finance in people’s lives requires knowledge of their activities and needs, not just their portfolios. Even seemingly similar households (in terms of, e.g., family size, income flows and fixed expenses) can have vastly different financial service needs. The aspirations of each family are likely to be different and may include sending a daughter to university, providing assistance to a cousin or running a business. The implications of these future aspirations may require different financial choices today; for example, those with long-‐term goals may want access to commitment savings. Risk, uncertainty, and uneven income flows are facts of life for poor and low-‐income people. Beyond households, mapping community networks to understand customers’ hyper-‐local markets and their complex social networks can reveal patterns of behavior and attitudes that would be valuable in product design.

The industry’s knowledge base with regard to understanding customers is quite rich. In the mid-‐1990s, the USAID-‐sponsored Assessing the Impact of Microenterprise Services (AIMS) project actively cultivated a renewed focus on customers by promoting client assessment tools that ranged from large-‐scale longitudinal studies to practitioner-‐friendly market research and evaluation tools. MicroSave, an international financial inclusion consulting firm, has been working with providers since then to build their own capacity not only for listening to clients but also for operationalizing insights into better product offerings. About a decade ago, FinMark Trust, a financial inclusion research trust, funded by the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID), initiated the FinScope studies to understand consumer demand across transactions, savings, credit, and insurance.

More recently, innovative academic research and business approaches have begun providing a deeper and more nuanced appreciation for poor people’s lives. The financial diaries approach, a longitudinal diary of household personal finances of the poor, has advanced our understanding of poor people’s cash flow management and their agile use of informal and formal financial intermediation. There is also greater, more refined and empirical use of segmentation analysis to understand clients, often based on using “big data.” Since the mid-‐2000s, impact evaluations using randomized control trials (RCTs) have helped uncover which product innovations and designs work, thus helping to clarify our understanding of how and under what conditions financial services benefit poor people. In 2012, the Global Findex, a breakthrough global demand-‐side study on financial inclusion, provided new insights into how people in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk.



One of the newest approaches used in the financial inclusion space to understand clients comes out of behavioral economics, which is based on the idea that a better understanding of social, cognitive, and emotional factors can help us understand why and how people – poor and rich – use financial services. Human-‐centered design also provides new ways to source customer insights and turn them into product ideas that work with the way consumers behave, instead of making consumers adapt their behavior to the product.

With this diversity of approaches available to learn about and from customers, we have a strong foundation of knowledge. We know the following:

• Even very low-‐income people lead complex financial lives, making use of a variety of informal and (if available) formal tools.

• Poor and low-‐income people often continue to use informal services, even when formal ones become available.

• Poor and low-‐income people use financial services to manage money day-‐to-‐day as well as to manage risk, invest and meet major life-‐cycle needs.

• Poor and low-‐income people have different entry points into the formal financial system; they do not use one gateway product or require a uniform or ideal sequence of products.

• Poor people do save, often at higher percentages than people in more developed countries, but they need the tools to help them save more, with greater convenience and ease.

• Poor and low-‐income people can get into trouble when credit is readily and easily available, particularly if they lack financial capability. They are also vulnerable to fraudsters and scams .

• Poor and low-‐income people benefit from formal insurance (however simple or partial) that complements informal risk-‐sharing practices, provided that they get good value for money, easy access and tangible benefits.

• Poor and low-‐income people have perceptions of formal institutions that may prevent them from considering the use of formal services.

Unfortunately, this wealth of understanding does not always penetrate provider organizations. We need to improve understanding of how diverse customer segments (across incomes, livelihoods, financial behaviors, genders, localities and ages) interact with financial services and how the use of a suite of products may differ from use of one product in isolation. We also need to deepen our knowledge on the drivers of usage, including the social, cultural, behavioral and transactional factors involved in moving from informal to formal services. People may appreciate the comfort, reciprocal relationships, accessibility and ability to easily manage liquidity that informal services provide. It may make sense for providers of formal services to target high-‐stress, informal coping mechanisms that people would like to change and to fill gaps in solutions offered by informal systems.

Financial services do not operate in a vacuum. A financial service tailored brilliantly to meet a specific, confirmed customer need may not be used if it is offered in a way that does not take into account the total customer experience and context. The skills, capacity, attitudes and culture of the customers and of the staff delivering services are key, as is the socioeconomic-‐political context in which they are delivered. Understanding the underpinnings of trust is also important. Trust is a critical element for financial services, especially savings and insurance; it is built slowly and eroded quickly. The extent to which a financial service meets customers’ needs depends on much more than financial terms and



conditions. Further, if a financial service cannot be scaled, it will not be attractive to providers. More work is needed to better understand the real demand for certain products.

Translating the increasingly rich array of knowledge that is available remains a sticky challenge. The body of insights available is not commensurate with the actions taken and real changes that still need to happen. Why? There are incentive, capacity, and business case obstacles, as the next two sections discuss.

B. Organizational Delivery Embedding a customer-‐centered approach requires a mix of science and art. Companies must develop a specific definition of what being customer-‐centered means and lay out a strategic approach that fits with their own market opportunities and internal capabilities. Customer orientation must be integrated into every step from pre-‐design to execution and measurement. Challenging aspects of becoming customer-‐centered include figuring out exactly what an institution focused on customers looks like, how to engineer all parts of the institution around the customer in an integrated fashion and how to manage the complexity needed for a high-‐value, customer-‐centered approach while keeping things simple for the sales team to deliver. The operating model for customer centricity covers the wide spectrum of capacities and functions needed for a provider to translate customer insights into product or service innovations that can scale. It includes governance, senior management, product development, delivery channels, marketing, management information systems, customer care and front-‐line staff. Most organizations, including financial service providers, dedicate the bulk of their human, financial and management resources to running their core existing business. It can be difficult for institutions to dedicate the energy and resources needed for developing customer-‐centric solutions. Some providers may not have the capacity to source client insights deeply or effectively design and implement new products and delivery approaches for scale. The required skills go beyond sourcing insights through market research and behavioral economics. Financial engineering skills are also required to translate core needs and aspirations into suitable product offerings. Smaller providers or traditional microfinance institutions may lack the capacity to do in-‐house market research, rapid prototyping and innovation, and they may also lack specialized research or product development departments. Some providers who are newer to working at the base of the pyramid may lack feedback loops that allow client insights from the front-‐end staff to reach decision makers who do not interact with customers directly. Moreover, institutions are often married to their existing systems, and it can be

“A customer-centric culture starts at the top. Customers are the center of concern when the leadership of the organization clearly cares about the customers. With this caring firmly in place at the top, the supporting systems and policies come relatively easily.”

– Christopher Dunford, Former President of Freedom from Hunger; Independent Rural Development Design and Evaluation Consultant



painful, slow and expensive to rewire systems to a different customer orientation or to introduce innovations. Three archetypal models emerge for how financial service providers might approach addressing customers’ needs and offering a more customer-‐centric experience: the in-‐house model, the outsourced model and the hybrid model. A hybrid model might best balance the benefits of the outsourced model (highly specialized skills, speed and fresh perspective) with those of the in-‐house model (more direct customer experience, investment in research, organization-‐wide integration and taking action). There are, of course, cost implications of each approach as well. Finally, even when there is a commitment and capacity to better serve customers, cost structures for certain products or hard-‐to-‐reach client segments may be prohibitive, and lower-‐cost innovations are needed. Innovations in disaggregating the business model are promising; specific institutions could focus where they add the most value and have a cost advantage – whether in acquiring customers, holding the risk, designing the product, or providing the payment infrastructure. Partnerships across banks, mobile network operators, microfinance institutions, agents and insurance companies are enabling the delivery of more value-‐added products at greater scale. There is also great potential for productive partnerships that integrate finance into education, health, housing, community infrastructure and agriculture value chains. These types of integration into other sectors and development priorities can help create demand – and activate usage – of formal financial services while delivering high social outcomes. C. The Business Case The journey to becoming customer-‐centered must include a vision of how the business case will be achieved. In the long-‐term, scalable ideas that generate value for customers also need to generate value for the provider. It is not surprising that credit, especially working-‐capital loans for microenterprises, emerged as the predominant product in the early sustainable models of financial services for the poor. Across all types of financial institutions, credit is typically the profit leader, especially when compared to savings. Regulatory barriers for credit are also lower than for savings and insurance. The institutional systems, staffing and process requirements for other services are different, as are the regulatory compliance requirements. Establishing the institutional capacity needed to offer a suite of services is expensive, and not all institutions focused on serving the base of the pyramid have the necessarily deep pockets. Nor can all institutions equally access the broader infrastructure, such as payments systems or deposit insurance,

Kshetriya Gramin Financial Services (KGFS) in India offers an innovative client-centered model. Front line staff members are trained as “wealth managers” and launch client relationships through detailed interviews to diagnose a prospective client’s financial needs and offer financial advice. Wealth managers then propose a customized mix of financial products that address the unique needs of each household, choosing from an array that includes savings, credit and insurance. Behind the scenes, KGFS’s offerings are enabled through sophisticated analytics of local economic data.



needed to get to scale. The microfinance sector, for instance, has traditionally focused predominantly on credit but continues to struggle to find scalable business models for other services. For commercial players, the small ticket size of transactions for the markets at the base of the pyramid and the cost of delivering to more remote and hard-‐to-‐reach customers can be prohibitive. In markets where there are still plenty of opportunities for growth or profits, it may be difficult to prioritize investments to reach this new customer segment. The calculation for some of these players may be determining how many “mainstream” customers they need to serve in a new market to afford to invest into a lower return-‐on-‐investment segment that nonetheless offers a massive opportunity in terms of market size. There may not yet be an actual business case for offering some products to certain people. Financial service providers need to define the levels at which viability is important – product, total customer profitability, segment, institutional – and over what time frame. The tradeoff of higher margins in the short-‐term versus possibly lower margins in the long-‐term is challenging for commercial players, especially publically listed corporations. Opportunities for cross-‐selling or total viability at a unit or branch level may allow providers to continue offering products that are not profitable on their own. Insufficient information exists today on the business results from taking a customer-‐centered approach in financial inclusion. Some research from the mainstream industry is telling, however: Elements of what we consider a customer-‐centered approach have been linked to better long-‐term performance as measured by return on assets. These elements include taking a “better before cheaper” approach, a customer life cycle view and solutions rather than product mindsets. New developments are also bolstering the business case for putting customers first. Innovations in technology are decreasing costs and making access to services more convenient, helping to alleviate some of the barriers to establishing sustainable business models for reaching poor and low-‐income people with a range of services. Innovations include technology such as mobile money and payments infrastructure, as well as low-‐tech, high-‐touch innovations such as savings groups and agent networks. Technology is also helping to open up new types and levels of information about clients that will make tailored design and delivery of services more efficient. The combination of rising incomes at the base of the pyramid (see Growing Incomes, Growing Inclusion) and the opportunity for providers to lower costs by leveraging technology may be the combination of drivers that finally helps tilt the business case dynamics toward customer-‐responsive financial inclusion. Finally, the customer-‐focused approaches described in the two previous sections should lead to greater usage of services, not just access. When products are designed to meet customers’ needs, customers use them and generate revenue for the provider. When products are not designed for customer needs – arguably, for example, the no-‐frills account in India – customers do not use them, providers do not make any money and the perception is spread that it is not financially viable to serve customers at the base of the pyramid. Designing products that customers will use will benefit the business case.



D. The Role of Other Stakeholders Governments have an important role in providing information on customers as a public good to benefit all providers and to inform policy. They can support customer research through household surveys and national data collection efforts that include demand-‐side surveys with questions on access, usage and quality. Customer research can help uncover potential market risks for poor and low-‐income customers so that governments can fulfill their role of protecting customers. Policy makers can also creatively use consumer research (e.g., in-‐depth individual interviews, group surveys and quantitative surveys) to solicit feedback directly from customers and to learn which financial services they use, how they make choices and the problems they face. Customer research can help governments craft policies and regulations that enable the introduction of more customer-‐responsive products and service delivery, thus facilitating responsible uptake of services. Funders have a role to play providing resources, facilitating access to know-‐how and knowledge management, and creating incentives to advance a deeper understanding of clients. Grant funders can support public good foundational research on customers and markets. Social investors can help share the risk of entering into new markets, serving untested customer segments and launching new products. They can also provide the patient capital and smart subsidies for providers to rewire their operating models around clients. Finally, funders can create incentives for providers to take a customer-‐centered approach though their due diligence, investment, and monitoring systems. Researchers from industry and academia also have a distinct role to play in augmenting the available knowledge about customers and how to better serve them. In addition, researchers from the design, anthropology, sociology, strategy and economic disciplines can partner with financial services providers to prioritize the most meaningful research questions and to share new knowledge relevant to improving the service offering.

Building customer-‐centric institutions is an issue for all types of service providers, not just financial institutions that serve the base of the pyramid. The task of running everyday business often gets in the way, and specific commitment, energy and resources are needed to relentlessly put customers first. Being customer-‐centric is a journey, however, and pursuing incremental progress can, over time, lead to significant value for customers and for providers. The first six recommendations of the working group are directed at financial services providers and the remaining ones speak to governments, funders, and researchers who can assist.

III. Recommendations



1. Build Functions for Systematically Listening to Customers Market research is a good investment, as is using the data available within the institution or with its partners (delivery channels or front-‐end agents). Financial service providers must allocate sufficient budgetary and staff resources to enable market research to be an energetic, high-‐quality, ongoing function. Spending time up-‐front to determine what questions need to be answered is advisable – a framework for data collection on customer needs could be developed by industry leaders. Ethnographic research and human-‐centered design offer intense approaches that identify needs and possible product responses customers may not even be able to express. Collecting information and data is not sufficient; specific people and units need to be responsible for interpreting and driving conclusions from the insights.

Action Point: Board members and senior managers should spend time regularly in direct, structured conversation with actual and potential customers. Action Point: Create feedback loops that enable information from front-‐line staff to spread through the organization. Low-‐cost technology makes this easier than ever before.

Action Point: Recruit front-‐line staff members that are able to build empathy with the customers, whether because they come from similar backgrounds, are screened for this ability or in some case are even former customers.

2. Make a Strategic Decision About the Target Market Using Segmentation

Few institutions can do it all. Strategy and purpose in selecting which customer segments an institution wants to serve creates focus and the ability to deliver excellence. Beyond basic demographic segmentation, providers can expand the lenses used to understand the distinct attributes and financial service requirements of different customer segments. Financial capability and behaviors are, for example, useful lenses that may have as much or more predictive value than age, gender or location.

Research AgendaProviders

Providers



3. Structure Operating Model Around the Customer Customer-‐centricity is about more than product development. Organizational culture, systems, processes, staffing, marketing and risk management all have to be oriented to the customer. Models that help diagnose areas of the institution that must be changed as well as demonstration cases that institutions can learn from are needed. Operating models that work for customers are based on a culture that encourages linkages across product lines and across internal functions to enable seamless customer service.

Action Point: Providers should invest in a customer relationship management system (CRM). A central CRM is needed to analyze, monitor and transform information into valuable insights and knowledge. Action Point: Senior management should actively drive the cultural incentives needed to deliver on an operating model structured around the customer. Action Point: Design processes to optimize the customer experience.

4. Adopt Methods for Rapid Product Prototyping The product cycle does not need to be very long, and it is in the interest of customers and institutions to generate many product ideas or refinements from insights, to prototype them and test them quickly, and then fail and move on, or move to true pilot and scale-‐up. Throughout the process, institutions should think about how they are adding value to the current needs – and existing financial relationships – of customers.

Providers Capacity- Building Agenda

Providers

5. Leverage Data Many institutions have a rich repository of data that can be used to drive client value while also increasing the effectiveness of business decisions. Data when used purposefully can help to better understand customers, inform product development and predict behavior. Institutions need new types of data sets and skills to make advances in customer-‐centricity. The desire to leverage data, however, should not outstrip the resources and analytical capacity of the institution.



Action Point: Identify key questions the institution has first, and then define the data strategy, including what data sets should be constructed.

6. Harness the Power of Technology Technology can facilitate the flexibility needed for innovative customer-‐centric solutions. Institutions can use new technologies to create interactive, low-‐cost means of maintaining “high-‐touch” relationships with customers even in remote areas. To build trust, it is important to understand where a human touch is needed and to what extent technology can mimic that. Technology helps to capture and mine data on customers and, of course, can dramatically reduce the cost of delivery, enabling financial service providers to offer a more diverse range of services cost-‐effectively. Careful investments in technology that keep pace with the capacity and strategy of an institution are recommended.

Providers

Providers

7. Introduce Metrics for Assessing Progress on Customer-Centricity Setting internal performance metrics that are tied to customer well-‐being and satisfaction and allow the institution to track how well it is addressing customer needs is essential. Financial incentives, including bonuses and commissions, can be tied to achieving these metrics. Metrics should also be put in place for the organizational changes needed to deliver well for customers.

Action Point: Metrics for customer-‐centricity must be integrated into the overall key performance indicators of the institution to align incentives.

Action Point: Use the Universal Standards for Social Performance Management (USSPM) as an excellent industry reference.

Providers SupportOrganizations



8. Use Smart Subsidies that Help Institutions Put Customers First Donors, foundations and social investors can provide the patient capital, smart subsidy and capacity building needed for providers to structure their operations to better address customer needs. They can also share the risk implicit in reaching out to new client segments and experimenting with new financial services. Funders can make sure they are fulfilling this role well by reviewing their due diligence, investment, grant-‐making and monitoring systems through a customer lens.

SupportOrganizations

9. Conduct Research on What Works to Build the Evidence Base Specific models, even if not directly replicable, are an important source of learning for institutions. Publishing cases on customer-‐centric institutions, what it took to get there, how they built their operating model, their business performances and so on would be an important public contribution. More research is also needed to explore active drivers of business as well as the causal link between customer-‐centricity and business viability.

SupportOrganizations

Research Agenda

10. Create a Favorable and Protective Environment Policymakers should refrain from mandating certain product features or financial inclusion strategies that prescribe sequenced access to services. They can also keep pace with innovations in the market place and, using customer research, identify risks to new users of formal financial services that require protective measures. Support from funders and networks such as the Alliance for Financial Inclusion may be useful in this regard.

Regulators



This working paper was created through a series of consultations with an experts’ working group on Addressing Customer Needs. We wish to express our gratitude to the Addressing Customer Needs Working Group for their active participation in group discussions and thoughtful contributions.

We also thank the many additional experts who reviewed drafts of the paper and provided input. Finally, we wish to thank the many CFI and Accion staff members who provided support including Allison Bernstein, Merene Botsio, Elizabeth Davidson, Anita Gardeva, Sonja Kelly, and Amanda Lotz.

The Center for Financial Inclusion accepts responsibility for the views expressed in this paper. Those views do not necessarily reflect the views of individual working group members or their organizations.

Expert Working Group on Addressing Customer Needs

Alexia Latortue, most recently, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) (Chair) Anita Gardeva, Center for Financial Inclusion (Facilitator) Asad Mahmood, Deutsche Bank Roy Hynes, MasterCard Worldwide

Olga Morawczynski, Grameen Foundation Camilla Nestor, Grameen Foundation Evelyn Stark, MetLife Foundation Graham Wright, MicroSave Nicole Zimmermann, Western Union

This publication was produced by Financial Inclusion 2020:

1101 15th Street NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20005 USA Tel 202.393.5113 Fax 202.393.5115 www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org

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Addressing Customer Needs - Center for Financial Inclusion ... · 4! ! Roadmap to Financial Inclusion Addressing Customer Needs September 2013 customerIcentered!organizationsdemonstrate!and!found!thatcompanies!often!had!to!reorienttheir