MicroFinTech: Expanding Financial Inclusion with Cost-Cutting Innovation

Microfinance is a solution for giving financial access to the unbanked, but its economic and financial sustainability is a prerequisite for widening its client base. Automation reduces costs, expands outreach potential, and improves transparency and efficiency. Technological solutions range from branchless mobile banking to geo-localization, digital/social networking, blockchain validation, big data, and artificial intelligence. This book examines these solutions comprehensively, showing potential applications to the traditional sustainability versus outreach trade-off.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 08 September 2022
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Microfinance is a well-known but divisive approach to providing financial access to the unbanked, even if micro-transactions raise costs and limit outreach potential. For Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) to have long-term economic and financial viability, expanding their potentially limitless client base is a requirement. Costs are reduced through automation, increasing outreach potential, and enhancing transparency and efficiency. Technological solutions include branchless mobile banking, customer geo-localization, digital/social networking for group lending, blockchain validation, big data, and artificial intelligence, up to "MicroFinTech" - FinTech applications tailored to microfinance. This book, of interest to scholars, students, and professors of financial technology and microfinance, comprehensively examines these trendy solutions, going beyond the existing literature and demonstrating potential applications to the traditional sustainability versus outreach trade-off.

Weight: 374g
Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783030803964
Edition number: 1st ed. 2021