 Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us today for this panel that's tracking progress towards financial access. What the latest data from Kenya tell us about the future of financial inclusion. My name is Jamie Zimmerman and I run the Global Assets Program here at the New America Foundation, which is the program that houses the Spinnaker Project, which underlies today's event. So let me tell you a little about Spinnaker. Spinnaker is a sort of rough word for the savings for the poor innovation and knowledge network. And this is an ongoing scoping project that we're working on within the Global Assets Program that's aimed at developing a sort of one-stop shop for data, analysis and engagement of the financial inclusion community around innovation that accelerates the pace of meaningful, effective financial access. When we got started on this project with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation a little over a year ago, we were motivated by a couple of different issues that we saw in the financial inclusion field. One was a real dearth of information and data on savings for the poor. Not only what is working and what's not working, but just in general, just data out there, not even to mention the analysis of that data. Systematic data collection on product details, on policies, delivery methods, performance, et cetera, by and large just wasn't happening. And in many cases, the field wasn't doing a really great job of sharing what they were doing, the little bit that was happening. Their insights, their lessons or their data in any sort of way that allowed for the field to kind of reduce duplication of efforts and work, working together more efficiently and more effectively or even working better individually by having more communication and better access around data. So Spinnaker was created back in 2010, late 2010, beginning of 2011, as an attempt to uncover how to make the work in this field greater than the sum of its parts and accelerate the pace of innovation towards meaningful financial inclusion. Part of our mission, and we have many different layers and objectives with the Spinnaker project, but part of the mission has been to crack this data nut. What data are out there? What's being collected? Where are the gaps? What can we do with new data if and when we get the data? How can we use them and share them with the field in ways that are useful, meaningful, that add to everyone's individual and collective efforts? Part of this plan to find some of those answers to those questions is to conduct a series of deep dives in specific markets that we deem does innovative or unique or both, which brings us to today's release of the report on savings for the poor in Kenya, which hopefully everybody saw outside. There are many copies of it. Grab one. It's also available online for those who are watching over webcast. This report is written by colleagues Anjana Ravi and Eric Tyler, who are in the room today and will be presenting in just a few minutes. This event is not only to release that report, but also to acknowledge that since that time when we started the Spinnaker project, that there have been a variety of new efforts and I guess the enrichment of ongoing efforts, the few that have been out there over the last year and a half, that are extremely encouraging. There's been a real increase in data-focused projects and more and better visualizations of this data and creating the analytical tools that allow us to understand the data, to parse through them and do something meaningful with what we have access to. For instance, the mixed market, who has been I think a real leader in data collection on financial inclusion, if not the leader on data collection and financial inclusion for several years. They've started a new mapping series that we'll learn more about today. Then, as most of you know, in partnership with Gallup, the global FinDex database is building upon a new path of openness being forged by and within the World Bank that's allowing for new global comparisons and financial inclusion that is really unparalleled by any other data initiative that's out there. I know personally that Spinnaker has benefited from both the mix and the global FinDex efforts and it's exciting for me personally and hopefully for everyone else, we'll see, to bring all three of these different initiatives together for the first time to discuss what we've been doing and what we found and have a discussion around that. I also want to just take a minute to say a few words on why we focused on Kenya for our report and for this event today and not some other country that could have easily been the topic of conversation. I think that most of everybody in the room is pretty well aware of Kenya's financial inclusive innovations and the amazing pace of financial inclusion in the country, I think driven in large part by advances in mobile access and the advent of M-Pesa as we'll hear, I think, much more about from Professor Billy Jack in just a moment. So I don't want to talk too much about why Kenya. I think that that's pretty well established within our field. But the impact of mobile money on financial inclusion efforts, the development of products and services, policies and practice across Kenya, I think has really caught the world's attention and not just those of us in the financial services and financial inclusion field, but the broader data, access, broadband, all things open data kind of world and the private sector and so on. And so I think it's a really amazing example of innovation outside of our borders that I think deserves a lot of attention. So I think that what's been going on in Kenya has raised a number of important questions about the implications of those advances on the future of financial inclusion, which is something that we're going to be talking about today, not only within Kenya itself, but just the rest of the world and our collective push for financial access. For instance, one important question that I hear and that I've also asked myself, and this comes up relatively frequently, is Kenya a beacon of hope for our financial inclusion efforts for the field of financial inclusion, or is it an irreplicable outlier that we can look at as extremely interesting but can't be replicated elsewhere? And a question that I have for today is can our latest data efforts that we're all engaged in start us down a path towards answering that question and deepen our understanding of not only the state of the field but the shape of its future direction and what that direction is. So I hope today's event is an opportunity to explore those questions and many others that I hope that you and the audience here in person and online also have on this topic as well. So let's get started. What I'm just going to do really briefly is give a rundown of today's agenda and just a few logistical details just to set the stage for everybody and then we'll get rolling with the presentations. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with opening remarks from Professor Billy Jack on Kenya's financial inclusion landscape and the recent lessons from his current research on mobile money there. Then Eric and Scott in the aura will present a variety of what we're calling data showcases prior to a panel of Q&A which will be moderated by Mireya Almasan from the Gates Foundation. So just a note for everybody for those who want to stick around and talk more about all things data and financial inclusion after the event. We will have an informal offering of wine and beer and you can hang out and be nerdy together. It's open for all and just a few reminders for everybody in the audience. The event is being webcast live. All of our events are so those watching over webcast or those of you who are here in house and like to tweet. You can follow the today's conversation over Twitter with the hashtag Kenya data 2012 right. Yes. Good. I got it right. And for those who are watching online or tweeting you can also submit questions that you have via this Twitter hashtag to the presenters and we will pass them up throughout the Q&A. So feel free to do that if you have some burning questions. Having livecast events also means that speaking into a microphone is extremely important. So if we're not speaking into a microphone or if you're not speaking into a microphone the people who are watching online can't hear what's happening. So during the presentations during Q&A you know please wait for a microphone identify yourself keep your question if you can brief and speak directly into the microphone for that. So that's it from me. So let's go ahead and get started. I just want to quickly introduce Professor Billy Jack. Professor Jack is the director of undergraduate studies and associate professor of economics at Georgetown University. He his research covers applied and empirical economic theory for development. But his recent focus has been on microfinance and mobile technologies and developing countries. His unparalleled expertise and cutting edge research on the Kenyan mobile money market makes him a very popular guy in the financial inclusion world right now. So I'm glad he's able to join us today for this discussion. Billy come on up. So thanks Jamie and Eric for the invitation. I'm sure most of you know that when you are asked to come and give a talk you also ask for a bio and you try and make it sound you know sound good enough that people show up. I just want to assure you that that bit about the first half of that was mine. The second half was okay. So it's very it's great to be here. Thanks a lot for inviting me and it's great to see so many nerds shall I say especially with beer and wine to come. I think you know the idea that making data or collecting data in the first place and then making it available to people is well you know it's the way to truth. If you like Sherlock Holmes said you know there's no point in thinking about anything until you just look at the data and then you can figure out what to do. So I'm glad to be part of that process. So let me tell you a little bit about the work I've done in Kenya. I think this audience is probably too familiar with M-Pesa for me to spend much time on it. But I will you know share some of the background with you relatively quickly. I think I've got about 10 minutes is that right? Yeah so I've used up one already. So this is a picture of mobile telephony in Kenya. Actually this is not a picture of mobile telephony. This is a picture of our landlines in Kenya. So from the late 1990s to 2010 or so there was a slow reduction in the prevalence of landlines in Kenya. And that was offset or at least in conjunction with a spike in the number of mobile subscriptions. So this looks kind of like mobile telephony was catching up to landlines. In fact if you put them on the same scale when realises that landlines are just irrelevant in the developing world. Like I said they've been able to leapfrog the mobile phones have leapfrogged that fixed line telephony that we all grew up with. Sorry that I grew up with and that some of you didn't grow up with. The advent of mobile technology in Kenya has made a lot of things possible that were just unthinkable before. So one thing that people used to think about in Kenya which is a country in which families are typically dispersed across a relatively large country with relatively limited infrastructure was how to get money from one person to another. So typically the way you would do that would be to catch a bus. Plus there being a relatively extravagant term for some kind of matatu of some kind. That was a dangerous slow costly process in order to get money home. So instead of that Mpeso provided a solution which was revolutionary artily revolutionary by orders of magnitude. By which money could be somehow miraculously sent home. When I first started looking at Mpeso was when I lived there. Everyone was trying to think how does the money actually get into the phone. Pictures of this didn't really do much to help people understand because it really looks like you're putting money into your phone somehow going over the airwaves. This effectively transformed people's lives although I should say it seems like it's transformed people's lives. The benefit of having data can allow us to see exactly how people's lives have been changed and how much they've been changed and whether there's any reason that governments should be interested in this. Whether this can be left to the private sector etc. So to give you a very brief and I'm sure somewhat unnecessary overview. The Mpeso concept is that it's just an accounting device. There's a computer somewhere in the SafariCom headquarters or maybe in Vodafone headquarters in the UK which has a list of accounts and you can just communicate that via your cell phone through SMS technology. The important thing and the more important thing than the technology is the prevalence of the so-called Mpeso agents which are these cash in and cash out agents that are around the country. Think of these as ATMs but with legs and people who can talk. So this is a little bit old, this particular graph but up until 2011 there was an increase in the number of users of Mpeso, the blue line which was matched more or less by the number of agents. Obviously they're on different scales but the increase in customers was matched by an increase in agents that was really extraordinary. So currently we're at about 35,000 functioning agents in the country. This is a country with about 1,200 bank branches so maybe a little bit more by now. So as I said orders of magnitude are deeper penetration of this financial service. So to give you some idea about the growth of this agent network, let me remind you where Kenya is to start with and then show you the growth of the agent network. So we actually did a survey of agents and asked them when they were formed. So from that over a period of three years we could map the growth of these things. Now this is going to be nothing compared to the visuals that the other speakers will present you with. That's why they put me first. So starting in June of 2007 which was only a few months after Mpeso had started, these little blue dots tell you where the agents were. And by the way, this first graph is actually very useful. It shows you that if you're going to start one of these businesses, the last thing you want to do is put all the agents in one place. You have to put them everywhere to start with and then you've got a chance of moving which means that there's a huge fixed cost associated with setting up any kind of network like this. And also reflecting the fact that Mpeso didn't make any money or made losses for the first few years of its operation. Anyway, over time in six months of the intervals we can see the growth of this network of agents up until 2009. So it's been growing even more. But effectively the agents haven't been spreading out, they've just been getting deeper everywhere which has increased people's access to them remarkably. So why was it so popular? I think this is old news. It was the customer's idea. How do I know that? Well, they were doing this already. As you know, in the developing world, most all cell phone calls are made on a prepaid basis and once you get credit on your phone you can send that to someone else and so people would typically do that. They'd send credit to someone up country. That person would then sell it to someone else nearby thereby affecting a financial transfer. The prepaid airtime had generated a lot of trust. People would say, you know, people must trust SafariCom a lot to give them their money and hope to get it back while they were doing that already when they gave them their money and hoped to make a telephone call in the next few days. So that wasn't a big deal. Accessibility, again as I said, there's 50 times or more the number of agents as compared to bank branches. It's really easy to sign up. It's cheap, convenient and safe. So it's great. There's no comparison with what was before. So if you were in Nairobi and wanted to send some money out to Kasumi on Lake Victoria how would you do that? There's two ways, the old way and the new way. And the old way, if you kind of do a little bit of accounting it turns out that you spend more than half of the money you're trying to send on sending it and the new way you spend like nothing. Now there are other means of sending money as well, Western Union, et cetera, and some of those other means have tried to match SafariCom's prices but the ubiquity and density of the network of users means that it's very difficult for other operations to catch up. So our survey to come to the topic of today's meeting about data when I say our I really mean her survey my colleague Tavenit Suri at MIT the Sloan School of Management has been deeply and I mean up to her eyeballs in this project for the last four years was of 3,000 households across most of Kenya. We left out a couple of places in the northern remote areas because at the time we started in 2008 there was virtually no cell phone towers and certainly very few impasse agents up there and very few people actually lived up there. And there were four rounds of this over the four years from 2008 to 2011 and these red dots show you where the households we talked to lived. I'm not going to go through all of the data but just on the subject of financial inclusion who's using impasse? So it turned out in 2008, you know, the idea this was going to be banking for the poor and banking for the unbanked and what happened? Well, it turned out that in the early days many more people used it who were relatively well off compared to relatively not so well off. In fact, the blue line is people on $2 a day or more. It's not a lot. The green line is $1.25 a day. So comparing these, you know, the better off guys with 2.7 times as likely to use it as the lower guys but that gap has narrowed over time. I don't really care about the gap, it's the fact that the green line is increasing so rapidly up to nearly 75% now that I think is important. There's three quarters of people who are really near the bottom of the pyramid using this service or have access to it. Similarly for the bank versus the unbanked, if you look at people who have a bank accounts of the red guys, people without bank accounts of the blue guys, it turns out that this wasn't originally a service for the unbanked. More people with bank accounts used it than without. But again, by the time we get to 2011, where up to 75% of the population who doesn't have a bank account is using M-PESA. So I think there's a real sense in which this is including people in the financial system. What does it do for people? I mean, there's an obvious, obviously we hope it makes them better off. One indicator of that is just the use. It's not free, right? So that's a good sign that it's actually useful. If it was free, then lots of people might have it and it may still be pretty useless. But because they're paying for it, there's a revealed preference there that it actually does something for them. How much does it make them richer? I don't know. That's really hard to tell. It's very hard to tell. The one thing we've been able to find from our econometric work is that it effectively provides individuals with insurance or it allows them to more efficiently ensure themselves through informal networks. So we do a lot of fancy footwork econometrically to show that basically people without access to EMPESA, when they suffer some kind of shock, on average their consumption goes down by 7%. But if you have EMPESA or have access to it, then you don't see a reduction in your consumption following such a shock. So people use this as a means of expanding the size and the scope of their network of people who can help them basically. And that's a real benefit. We're a real quantifiable benefit of EMPESA. So I'll finish with just a note on what comes next. I think certainly what comes next and what is happening now, it's transactional services I think are important. If we want to include poor people in the financial system, what does that mean? It means allowing them to do everything that we do without even thinking. So paying for things, bill payment, so urban electricity and water, et cetera. That's stuff that I used to buy when I lived in Nairobi. That's not really relevant for the poor. But things like user fees for rural water systems. There's a rural water system in Kenya now that you can pay using EMPESA. Turns out to be a great idea because the less money there is floating around and getting kind of stolen, the more likely this system is going to be to be maintained and sustainable into the long term. My current topic of interest is one that's not mentioned in polite company, but some toilets basically. How are you going to make them sustainable? To make them sustainable, you've got to get people paying from a little amount, a tiny amount, but we all use them enough that a small amount can go a long way. Personal finance, school fee, prepayment. That's kind of savings, but we don't like to call it savings with EMPESA because it's not meant to be a savings product. Savings go forward in the health sector. I'm working with a group now looking at helping women, pregnant women, save for their deliveries. A very definable event that's going to happen in nine months and using some kind of mobile device to save for that is potentially useful. Microfinance and business services as well. Microenterprise credit, trade credit, other kinds of microfinance. So I'll stop there. That's where the kind of stuff we're doing and I look forward to learning about whatever else we're doing. Thanks. Okay, great. Thanks, Billy. This is going to be, I think, I'm interested and intrigued to see whether the new data and the maps that have been created by MIX and the World Bank and here within the Spinnaker corroborate or challenge some of the things that you're seeing in the analysis that you've been doing. So we're going to do our showcases now, our quick data showcases, and I'm just going to really quickly introduce each of the different, our three different showcase presenters, but each will come up individually and present so that they're not blocking the view here. So the first up is Eric Tyler, who's a program associate here at New America with our global assets program, where he's conducting the research writing and advocacy on all kinds of topics, but mostly at the intersection of technology emerging economies and economic development. But I'd like to think that he's focusing like 150% of his time solely to Spinnaker, but he does a lot more than that too, and successfully as well. He's spearheaded a lot of our research and deep dive efforts, as well as our data visualization efforts. So the report that you'll see, the data that's coming out of it, all of that is a product of his work and something that I'm very grateful for. Next up is Scott Gull, who doesn't work for me, so I'm not going to say as nice things about him. Just kidding, I will try. He's the director of analysis at the MIX market where he's managing the production design and innovation of analysis products for MIX, along with leading MIX's industry research efforts. In addition at MIX, Scott researches data supply chain innovations that serve MIX's mission and audience needs. And then our third showcase and final showcase presenter will be Leora Clapper from the Global Thindex Initiative at the World Bank. Dr. Clapper is a lead economist in the finance and private sector research team in the development research group at the World Bank where she currently focuses on entrepreneurship, household finance, and measurements of financial inclusion, including this Thindex database. So the panel afterwards, and I'll just go ahead and introduce this part, that will open up for Q&A, will also include Professor Jack, and will be moderated by Mireya Almasan, and I'll just take an opportunity to introduce her as well. She's a program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and their financial services for the poor team. And the Gates Foundation supports much of the work that's being highlighted today, if not all of it, I'm not totally sure. But Mireya personally has a keen interest and expertise in understanding of Kenya and the East Africa market more broadly. And since part of her role at the Gates Foundation is to draw lessons from the field to inform the Foundation's strategic priorities, I suspect she'll have several pressing questions for our panelists after seeing their showcases to that point. So prior to joining the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mireya did a span of global work from South Africa to Nicaragua and everywhere in between. So we're grateful to take advantage of her trip to D.C. to tap into her expertise to enrich and enliven today's discussion. So now that the introductions are all out of the way, we can move more quickly through all the more fun stuff. And so Eric, come on up and get started. I'm excited to have a couple of minutes to share some insights and analysis from the data that we collected a couple months back in Kenya. Before I jump into the data page that we've been putting together over the past couple of weeks, I'm going to quickly touch upon the data philosophy that we have as part of the Spinnaker project. In many ways, the concept behind Spinnaker is similar to the concept behind the original Sears catalog. The original Sears catalog was meant to showcase and share information on the latest and most cutting-edge household products. Spinnaker is focused not on household products but financial products and specifically saving products that are available and targeting the poor. And one of as many as Billy Jack was mentioning, one of the contexts and landscapes that we were really interested in pursuing and capturing was Kenya. So without further ado, I'm going to jump into the data page. That looks like... Ah, great. And so we collected data on over 100 different saving products across Kenya. And one of the things that we were immediately struck by was the wide range of different financial institutions that were engaged in this space. So you have the traditional players like commercial banks, like microfinance institutions, state-owned banks, postal banks. But then you also increasingly see a lot of technology startups in this space. Insurance providers and asset management companies that are increasingly engaged in this space in driving competition even to the bottom of the pyramid. This is, as an example of this, these are three products that are targeting women in Kenya that are taken directly from the Spinnaker website and the data that we collected in Kenya. And the institutions cannot be more different. The first institution is Kenya Woman Finance Trust. It's a microfinance institution that's based in Kenya. And one of the most interesting things about their product has to do with their pricing. So meaning that their pricing, the minimum opening deposit of their account is zero. So you can start savings with as little as ten Kenya shillings or ten cents. This compared to the Changa Monca maternity card, Changa Monca microhealth is a technology startup that is developing a smart card technology so women can build up sums of money towards maternal health goals like giving birth or something along those lines. And the third institution that we have displayed here is INM Bank. And INM Bank is really focused more on the advertising and dissemination efforts. They utilize a wide range from mobile messages to billboards to emails to market and create a value proposition with their customers. I'm going to now jump to, as Billy Jack touched upon, I would be remiss without talking a little bit about how technology has completely or relatively completely transformed the delivery and access to financial services in Kenya. And right now I've looked at in the past four years three different access points. Microfinance branches, commercial bank branches and ATMs, but when you compare this to bank agents, so in 2010 the Central Bank of Kenya opened up regulation that allowed for agent banking. So pretty much it allowed commercial banks to outsource certain financial activities to retail shops. So think grocery stores, think gas stations. And in one year there's over 8,000 agent banks or banking agents that were spread out across Kenya. However, if you compare bank agents to mobile money agents, again you see this number is dwarfed. So there's a huge mobile money agent network that's grown across Kenya. And what's even really interesting, if you look at the first year of growth of bank agents compared to the first year growth of mobile money agents, the bank agents actually grew at a faster rate. During the research, the Central Bank of Kenya also opened up regulatory methods, regulatory, excuse me, regulation around agent banking to microfinance institutions. You're going to see a lot of movement in this space. And these trends in technology were also seen in our data. 75% of the institutions we surveyed offered one or more of their saving products via a mobile phone. The third really interesting data story that we saw was involving commercial banks. This is a flow chart that tracks each one of these circles represent a different commercial bank in Kenya. And the size of the dot corresponds to the volume of deposits. So as the volume of deposits grow, the dot of each of these banks will grow. And as you can see, there's a handful of different players that are really successful in mobilizing volume of deposits. Kenya Commercial Bank is a pioneer in this space. Equity Bank and also Cooperative Bank of Kenya. I think even more interesting is when you take a look at the number of deposit accounts. So these are the same commercial banks, except for this time, the dot corresponds the number of deposit accounts at each one of these institutions. And what you see is one institution, Equity Bank, really pioneering in having it being successful in this space. And then towards in the more recent years, you also see Kenya Commercial Bank mobilizing a lot of deposits accounts as well. If you take a closer look at this data, it tells a really interesting story. And in the past, since 2006, Equity Bank has created over 4.4 new deposit accounts. 97% of these have a volume of deposits below 100,000 Kenya shillings, the equivalent of a thousand US dollars. Kenya Commercial Bank tells a similar story. The majority of these accounts are below 100,000 shillings, excuse me. And if you look at the social mandate and the mission statement of these two, of Equity Bank and KCB, you'll see a different story. Equity Bank has a social mandate at its heart. Inclusive customer-focused financial services that socially and economically empower clients. Kenya Commercial Bank, it doesn't incorporate or integrate a social mandate into its mission statement. It says to be the preferred financial solutions provider in Africa with a global reach by 2013. So these were three interesting and unique insights to the Kenya context, but we invite you to explore all the data that we've made publicly available on the Spinnaker website and compare and visualize and come up with your own data stories. Thank you so much. Okay, great. And next up is Scott Gull from the Mixed Market. He's going to showcase the Mixes Kenya Financial Inclusion Data Map, which compiles a range of Kenya-focused data sets, Spinnaker data, among a number of data sets. So come on up. Great, so thanks to everyone for coming. Do I run this from here? You got it, awesome. Thanks to everyone for coming and for Spinnaker and New America for hosting us today. So I'm going to talk about a little project that we've been working on for the past few months, which happens to focus on Kenya, but this is something that we think also would work and could be done in other markets, and so I'll talk a little bit about that as well. Go to the first slide. Do I do it? Got it. So this is kind of our motivation. So why would we look at data on financial inclusion? Why would we want to bother to go through the effort to pull together this kind of resource? So this is, for those of you that have read or at least familiar with Portfolios of the Pores, is the balance sheet for two of their clients. They're in Bangladesh. But the story is basically the same that the poor have very sophisticated and diverse financial lives. There's a lot of different services through different channels, through different types of institutions. So we're learning a lot more about the lives of those clients through this work, and I think the work that Lou is going to show in a few minutes. But what we wanted to do was figure out who's on the other end of these transactions. So if they're a client of a microfinance institution or of a bank, what's the counterparty for this person? Who's providing services to Hamid and Khadijah and their activities and their footprint so that we get a read on who's providing and who could provide financial services to the poor. Other way. Great. So we've been pulling together mapping efforts in a couple of different sectors, and we've worked on Sub-Saharan Africa for the past several months through the generous partnership of the MasterCard Foundation. We've gone through South Africa, Rwanda, and Kenya. We picked three markets that we thought were very interesting and interesting to see how they could be used to help people with their financial needs and their characteristics. So at a high level, you can pull the information together and get a read on how do these sectors differ from each other, where are they similar. There's components that are all shared. They all have banks. They all have microfinance institutions. They all have cooperatives. They have them with different frequency and their kind of different flavors that have at a sort of an even higher penetration rate. So per person, there are more non-bank credit providers in South Africa than there are in Pesa Agents that we know of in Kenya, which seems hard to fathom. So we get a little sort of high level view of the structure of each sector. And that's useful, but we want to take this beyond just saying a lump of banks or a lump of cooperatives to figuring out what those individual institutions are like and learn a little bit about where they are and what types of services they either do or could provide. I keep clicking the wrong way. So what we've been doing is focusing on mapping. Mapping is a way to kind of visualize this information to make it publicly accessible and to unpack some parts of the story behind this data. So we've been working now on Kenya. This should be active now. We have some more colleagues from Development Seed who have been helping us to put these maps together in the audience. And Kenya, it's a collaborative approach than in some of the other markets because there's so much attention and so much intensity focused here that there's actually a lot of data. But it's sitting in sort of different everybody's got a little sliver of the world that they know a lot about, but we haven't seen where it's all been pulled together. So we've got data on the savings products that Eric and the Spinnaker team have helped open up access to FSD Kenya and the Central Bank of Kenya map bank branches a little couple years ago, but still of use the World Savings Bank Institute is on a project working with the branches for the Postal Savings Bank and Agents. We work with microfinance institutions, Woku their countries to have help open up data on the 4,000 credit unions that operate in Kenya. We're using data on demand surveys at a province level from Finscopes that were run there. So we're trying to pull all this data together so you can get a pretty big holistic view and it's something close to recreating the set of counter parties that are on that ballot sheet that we talked about at the beginning. We're using some things that are kind of cool, I think, for the nerds in the audience about getting the data together and getting access. So if you want to talk to us about that, me about that with over a beer, I'd be more than happy to. And there's a couple other countries that are up now as well, so you can get a different view of this. Jiminy Christmas. Great. So one of the things that's nice when people release and share data is you find little nuggets of information in it that are potentially of interest. So one of the things that we saw in data on the bank branches and data on the cooperative sector and on microfinance institution is something about when these branches are established, when that sort of reach went into different parts of the country. So this is the last 100, 110 years of the financial sector development in Kenya. And you can see there's pretty rapid change. This is the branch footprint. This is bricks and mortar, so they've got a building. This isn't just the age and banking picture. So if you roll back and we look at sort of within our lifetime, if you were born in 1960s, you know, 50 years or so ago, you would have seen there be banks and cooperatives in some parts of the country, not that many, kind of about the same number across the country as a whole. But within the last 50 years or so, there's really been a sea change in the sector. And we see that there's about 8 times as many bank branches as there were 50 years ago. There's about 30 times as many cooperatives though, so we may look in, our lens is very clear on banks globally but this cooperative sector has had, you know, multiple much more reach in different parts of Kenya over the past 50 years over a long period of time than bank branches. And if you paid attention in the last 10 years or so, you'd have seen this little trickle at the edge of microfinance institutions almost getting up to where bank branches are today, but, you know, fairly rapid growth, but really within this long span, a fairly short time horizon. I'm not going to get that by the end of the presentation. So this is the same graph with agent banking captured into it. So we've got from zero to the best data we could find was 28,000. Now it's 35,000. There are a lot of agents in South, and sorry, not in South Africa, in Kenya. There's a little sliver down there for agents through the post bank who also have an agent banking system and I know Eric had some of the data on the rest of the banking sector. So when you look at what looked like a sea change from having, you know, a very thin sliver of banks and cooperatives 50 years ago to today, and you lay the agent banking change onto that, it's really incredible. And I think this is what opens up questions for us about what the long-term development of the financial sector would be like, what could we anticipate? You know, where would agent banking go? What haven't they reached in the country? What services aren't they providing? And so when you see this type of growth, that's the thing that for me provokes a lot of questions. Growth is something that within microfinance sectors attract a lot of interest, and so that's what we're going to look at. So we're going to look at what the footprint of these institutions is, and so when you get good granular geographic information, you can utilize other good granular geographic information to kind of put that into context. So we took poverty data that the governor of Kenya through their open data initiative has been wonderful in making publicly available, and we plotted that at a district level by the different channels and types of institutions. There's about 70 different districts, and this breaks out each different channel plotted against the total population of the number poor in each, and so what you can see the short version on this basically is that you see the different reach of each type of channel, so there's more M-PASA, then there are cooperatives, then there are banks, etc. That's the scale, and if you look at the slope, the slope is actually pretty similar for each of them, so they are as likely to be located in poor or affluent areas as each other. So if you might expect maybe banks are more likely to be located in affluent areas than microfinance institutions, something like that, this is at a district level, and then the slopes would be different for the lines. There's nothing counterintuitive here, but again you want to have the data and look at it to sort of get a read on those questions. Then we're hoping to be able to take this one step further, and this is where the collaboration with Spinnaker has been really productive, so they have really good product data, and now we've got pretty good data on locations for different types of institutions providing those products, so you can, as the kids call it, mash the landscape for financial services, you can get the sort of surface map of the country, looking not at just the infrastructure, the footprint, but really on a cost basis, and the attributes of those products, so what are those, what if someone is going to look for a savings product in town X, what are they likely to find, and so you can see where there's high fees for opening fees, high fees for inactivity, these are mapped using the exact same data that Eric is talking about, and you can look at it by district, again, there's 70, so this is kind of unwieldy here, but this is now data that's basically publicly accessible, this took about five minutes of work to do, using some of the tools that are out there, so this is the kind of thing where we can't answer all of the questions, but having the data available makes it easier for other people to answer questions, so we have here a big list of questions that are unanswered, at least based on the slides today, but I want to provoke people to think about what else you can do, and I'll get to have a shiny report that we're very happy with that has to do something after that, so I'm sorry for running over, that's it. Thanks. Thank you for the opportunity to present what we think is very exciting data that was launched last month at the World Bank IMF Spring Meetings, and so we know that financial inclusion allows adults to smooth their consumption, to ensure themselves against many economic uncertainties that they face from illness to accidents to theft to unemployment, financial inclusion also allows the poor to save and to borrow, to invest in economic entrepreneurial opportunities to invest in education, and to save for the future, and so however we had no metrics of financial inclusion, no metrics of the percentage of adults who are banked to save, who borrow, and so the goal of this project is to collect comparable data using consistent methodology, consistent questions around the world, which is quite an ambitious undertaking. And so with generous funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation we partnered with the Gallup World Poll Survey, which since 2005 has been surveying at least a thousand individuals in up to 150 countries per year, and so again using consistent methodology, interviewers are trained consistently around the world, and we use identical questions based identically in every survey in every country. And so the goal is really to collect data on how adults around the world save, borrow, make payments, and manage their risk. And so what's special and new about this data is that it's collected from the perspective of the individual and we're very careful as I'll discuss in the next few slides to ask about ownership of the account. Do you, yourself or jointly with someone else, can you deposit into or can you withdraw from the account? Which really allows us to get at the questions of economic empowerment of women, of youth, of the poor. And so as mentioned, so here's an example of the rigorous survey methodology sorry it's not so clear so the red Gallup surveys by selecting first six population strata within each strata they collect hundreds of PSU-specific zip codes, blocks or villages where they then randomly select households and individuals based on the Kirsch grid. Kirsch grid. And so here's our headline indicator and map the percentage of the banked of those having an account at any regulated institution of bank, cooperative, post office microfinance institution around the world. We find that 41% of adults in developing countries relative to 89% of adults in high income countries are banked, including 24% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa. We also find that over two and a half billion adults do not have an account. When I mentioned before we're also able to splice the data by demographics. So for example we find that the, those adults who are in the top 20% of earners within countries are more than twice as likely to have an account as a bottom 20% of earners. We also find persistent gender gaps. Interestingly, we don't find in high income countries, in developing countries, across all income categories, we find a persistent gender gap. So for example, even within the top 20% of earners in developing countries we find a persistent 9% each point gap between men and women in financial inclusion. We could also look at more objective measures of poverty. And so for example we find that over 75% of those living under $2 a day have a formal account. So here we have the data spliced by region. It's a necessary caveat about the Middle East that's a more limited sample because of the political difficulties last year in surveying in the region. However we find that financial inclusion in Africa is relatively low. As I mentioned earlier, you know the basis of this data, we can splice and dice the data by individual characteristics. So I put up some examples in Kenya. So not only do we have measurement that 42% of adults are banked, we could dig deeper, identify who is the unbanked. So for example, we again see this persistent gender gap, 46% of men versus 39% of women. We find a strong gap between rural and urban residents likely reflection of penetration of bank penetration in rural regions. We also find a very strong income gap, 19% of the lowest 40% of earners versus 85% of the highest, top 20% of earners. And so we also, and I apologize because of time, I encourage you to read our report. I'm leaving a lot of juicy details. We also ask about the modes of access ways that you deposit into and throw from your account. We also ask questions on the frequency, how many times per month you deposit in withdrawal. So for example, we identified almost 200 million adults around the world have zero deposits into withdrawals from their account in a typical month. We also are interested in how you use your account. Is it enough that your employer sets up an account for you, or government or for government payments, but whether you also use your account to save or to send remittances, for example. So here, for example, we're showing the use of accounts for family remittances, to send or receive money, and find that 38% of account holders in Sub-Saharan Africa use their accounts to receive money from family members living elsewhere, and then I break it down for Kenya as well. The largest reported use of accounts is to send or receive money from family living elsewhere, and only 12% of account holders use their accounts to receive government payments. And so this, I think, is perhaps one of the most interesting data from our database. And so again, it's one thing that people have an account. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, for example, many people have an account that's established for them by employers to receive wage payments, or the government to receive government payments. But it's another thing for people to have the trust and confidence, the confidence that the government isn't going to expropriate and going to steal their money, and actually use the bank to save. And so we find that 17% and so here's the distribution. We have the formal being that grade category, the shadows being community-based, and formal in the bottom being community-based only. That includes, for example, RASCAs in Africa where people make regular payments and receive the money on a rotating basis. And so it's interesting that we find that 17% of savers developing a world use a form of community-based saving, although it's 48% of savers in Kenya use this form of RASCAs. And so certainly the high use speaks to its popularity, but there's also the high risk of theft and fraud. We hear anecdotally that people belong to five RASCAs because the first four are going to steal their money. And so again, this may highlight the need for safer products. This may be a market, the people who are able to commit to regular payments that may be a missing market for the formal sector. And so I certainly couldn't not show you a map of mobile banking penetration when we're talking about Kenya. So we also ask whether you use your mobile phone to send or receive money or to make pay bills or make payments. And so we find that 16% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa use a mobile phone to pay bills and receive money or send or receive money in the past 12 months. It's clearly much higher, the highest usage in the world of mobile technology. I'm sorry, the developing world is that 68% of adults in Kenya use this mobile technology driven certainly by the early success of MPSA. However, it's interesting to note that 40 has been discussed earlier. 42, I think our data is roughly consistent. The 42% of adults, 41% in Kenya that use the mobile technology otherwise unbanked. Suggesting that this point, mobile technology is often being used as a substitute for formal banking services. And so finally I'll show some additional data. This data was collected by Jake Kendall from the Gates Foundation. So we added two hour data to the Gallup World Poll Survey in 11 countries. Additional detailed questions on how well, among other things, how, especially how money is sent and received. And so I think this picture is quite striking how different Kenya is from the rest of Africa. And certainly an interesting discussion is how and if the rest of Africa can or should catch up. And so we see here that what was the method used to send largest domestic remittance payments in the past 30 days. So 90% of respondents in Kenya report using a mobile money transfer where it's 16% on average in the other 10 sub-saharan countries. Including Uganda and Tanzania. So to conclude, the complete database is available on our website to download including plus additional reports, some of which we have outside, and we welcome your use of the data. Thank you. Okay, great. Thanks. We're going to go straight into Q&A. So, panelists, you want to just come on up and sit down? Is this yours? Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. It's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you to all of the presenters for a very insightful last hour. From the perspective of a donor that would really like to contribute to financial deepening in Kenya, this has been particularly useful. If our approach is to be data-driven, we really need to rely on the work of partners such as yourselves. So, thank you for the industry goods that you're providing. So we'll spend the next few minutes reflecting on the data presented and then we'll open it up to the audience for Q&A, so for you in the room and for those of you that are listening online as well. So, maybe, Billy, if you would like to help get us started by providing your perspective on the information that was shared and just really talking about how it resonates with your own research in Kenya and what you found surprising. Is this on? Not sure. Okay, good. Thanks. Thanks. She told me ahead of time I'm going to put you on the spot and that was it. So, something that's maybe not surprising but gratifying is that our data is somewhat consistent with the data that was presented which is good. I think there's a big difference between the kind of data I've collected or have been involved in collecting and somewhat more ambitious data projects that have been presented here. Collecting data for the whole world is just unfathomable and I really salute the people who have the hootspat to try. I think it's important because it's important in one respect and it also, I think, begs a question in the other respect. The technology we have these days for creating these maps and these visuals etc. is really wonderful. It helps us see what's going on. I think the next important question is so what do we do with that? We see that Kenya is way ahead or way different at least to a lot of other countries. What now? So I think maybe the best thing about this data is that it helps us then start thinking how these things have happened, what the differences are between countries and where those differences have grown from and what that means for policy or for private sector involvement whatever. So I see the data as being a really welcome contribution to allowing us to look at the world and I think we then need to think about the world and how it can be better. So it's a great first step. Great and that's actually a perfect segue to this next question on how to make this data actionable. This goes to all of the panelists. How do you envision your data being used by different stakeholder groups? By whom and to what end? Miora, would you like to start? Sure. So there are different uses of our data. Certainly policy makers, we've already heard that from Egypt to Mexico to the U.S. Our data encourages policy makers to sit up and say, hey, I didn't see those gaps. The gap in financial inclusion, the gap in gender, the gap between the rich and the poor. For example, even in the U.S. we find that the lowest 20% of earners have the lowest account penetration after Italy in the developed world. There's a persistent gap that's also highlighted in the earlier FDIC reports, for example. Hopefully this will encourage policy makers to take action. Also I should mention that the data will be collected, the complete database try annually and the two headline indicators on the percentage of bank penetration and percentage of current credit will be collected annually for at least the next nine years. Over time we can start looking at the impact reforms and benchmarking changes in inclusion going forward. Our data also will hopefully be useful to practitioners or identifying missing markets. It's not enough perhaps for the government to go after these gaps but also for the private sector to identify where there are gaps and where there may be market potential. People are able to commit to regular savings. People who are using informal credit. We also, our data highlights not only the use of formal products but also informal products. Finally, I know researchers are very excited in October will be releasing the complete micro database of 150,000 observations and hope that will be helpful for the research community as well. Thanks Scott. Let me give two kind of answers to this. One is we're not a policy shop. I mean we're a data shop basically. One of the uses of this data so to speak would be for I think data community itself. So what we want is by pushing the envelope on using and making data publicly accessible to have others make other data available. And so to try and lead towards this not being something where Kenya is an isolate globally but that it's you can see the same type of information on other markets. I think we're generally confident that there is use for that data but that's I think one use of these types of exercises is by getting others to adopt the same practices. This is again another area where Kenya is really at the leading edge of the developing world because the government has this open data Kenya initiative where they have an incredible wealth of information on Kenya publicly accessible, very easy to access and use. It does not include a lot of data or any data on financial services and so that's something where there's maybe a little bit of a gap but overall they're really far ahead of other countries in the region and the world. So that's one use I think of data to produce more data. For actual use of the data not just within the sort of data community we have I think the same type of segmentation that Lior described and I think that we all sort of informally talked about earlier so we see you know there's policy makers who could use this to inform decision making about policy there's donors and investors who could use this to determine to help inform their allocation of resources should I be looking at rural areas should I be looking at urban areas should I be looking at industry X, Y or Z should I be looking at this type of service so I think that overall can help the allocation of resources I think the ultimate productive use of this is really at the operator level but that's the one where there's the longest time horizon so we're I think starting and getting there but that's a long road to tread. Speaking from experience you know we've worked on that for the microfinance sector for the past decade or so and it's you know it was very challenging 10 years ago transparency people are very uncomfortable sharing information but gradually that grew over time and having people who are leaders in the industry helped create sort of better practices around sharing data and now it's actually fairly easy to access a pretty broad range of information on that and because of that fact it's also used at the operator level for business decision making for practitioners so I think that's there on the horizon I suspect we're not really there yet for financial inclusion data but starting with the policy maker starting with the donor conversation is probably the first step in that process yeah and I think that when you're responding to how to make data actual one of the first questions you should ask is around who's the end user of the data and some of the early users that we've seen of our data have been financial institutions on the ground who are interested in just learning from other markets so institutions in the Philippines who are looking at data from products in Kenya and just trying to spark ideas and see what's going on in a different market that they hear is really innovative in the space I think another area that we've tried to focus on and I know mixed market has as well around creating actionable data is around visualizations so creating on the Spinnaker website we have product comparisons we have graphs we have even a couple maps to try to really dig into and so users can find their own data and I think the last point that Scott was touching on a little and something that we've even seen as a promising trend in Kenya is this opening up of data and so looking at some of the whether it be an API or whether that be just having a downloadable button on your website but really freeing up that data beyond PDFs is a great way where new people and new users can find stores that you haven't seen in the data necessarily. Great and indeed we at the Gates Foundation are very much using your data to inform our grant making as well as for regulatory and commercial advocacy purposes so it is being put to good use I can assure you at least from our end. So one last question from me before I open it up to the audience what are the major data gaps that you see in tracking progress towards financial inclusion in Kenya and yes I am asking for advice on what major efforts we should be looking out for in the donor community sure whoever Billy would you like to start? I'll actually leave it to the professional data gatherers I think to address what gaps in data you're looking for but maybe I could suggest gaps in issues that need to be addressed with the use of data so what can we do to make people's lives better what financial innovations can improve the lives of people they might not those might not exist at the moment these innovations so I think we need to look at creative solutions that use the new technologies that we have at hand to improve people's lives let me give you as an example that water payment example I mentioned quickly so we've known for years how to get water out of the ground and donors have built thousands of these pumps all over the world millions and they all fall into disrepair very quickly so and one of the reasons is that speaks to some kind of lack of capacity for communities to invest in and maintain and finance local public goods of some kind I see mobile money as being a way of empowering those communities to solve that coordination problem or that collective action problem and so I guess that's one example where financial innovation can it be used to solve a long standing problem that is really boring like water getting water out of the ground we kind of thought we knew how to do that but I think the problems that resolve revolve around that issue might actually be at heart financial problems and so those kind of financial innovations I think would be interesting to investigate further that's not so much a data problem that's a kind of use to which this technology can be put Laura something I didn't present was we also ask those who are unbanked for the reasons why they don't have an account and so the most commonly reported reasons are the cost distance and documentation particularly in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in Kenya and so certainly this highlights the promise of these new products processes and technology like banking agents like mobile banking that seems to have transformed the financial sector landscape in Kenya but something we don't have data on is actual costs so for example what is the cost for MPES we now have some information but what is the cost of the alternatives what is the cost of sending money through a bank and so better cost data on all sorts of transactions both formal and semi-formal and informal I think would be quite helpful great Scott this is right in our wheelhouse because I get to complain about other people's data so this is very satisfying personally for me there's a couple of different places that we saw gaps for Kenya across the board and this is not only true for Kenya the one thing that's an issue is either standardization or data quality so data that people are releasing is as Eric alluded to often in PDF formats are sort of unusable for digital work the data is not standardized basic things like having the addresses parsed into usable fields are not done these are sort of technical concerns but when you are dealing with large volumes of information they're meaningful that's true for pretty much everybody just trying to do anything on this front it's not the worst problem in the world but it's there three things that are somewhat specific to Kenya the first I'll kind of pick on them because they're the light in a lot of these presentations but the data from Safari.com is not particularly useful so they have very high level information on the number of agents and branches but anything more detailed is not of a quality that I think is decision making at a granular level helpful so they release they have 35,000 agents now anyway north of 20,000 easily they have a listing of 17,000 agents on their site as the best location information for their customers we know for things like banks and for bank branches the central bank of Kenya was able to pull levers on banks to get good information on the bank branches I'm not sure who pulls the lever on Safari.com they're mobile providers globally to provide better quality granular information so that's a gap because they have such a huge role in the sector and the rapid growth in the footprint so that's something where better data would be I think useful you shouldn't have to knock on their door to get it data on the informal sector and Luro talked about this a little bit savings groups that's a data set that we're hoping to be able to include in this mapping effort and it's taking a little bit longer than we could do to show that today that I think should be there having that globally being able to validate questions about whether they're really serving underserved areas whether they're working in rural areas or places that banks won't or can't go that's something that would be useful to validate better information on that sector I think it's there it just needs to kind of get brought to the public and then the other piece is the part that isn't measured and that's doing this across countries we saw some good information in other countries in South Africa we pulled data they have a regulator that's very comprehensive in covering credit providers and so we got data on twenty to thirty thousand credit providers in South Africa this include this is all non-bank so this includes payday lenders it includes pawn shops it includes auto people providing vehicle finance so this is all the suite of financial services that the poor and the affluent and the middle income encounter in their day-to-day lives and it's outside the lens of regulators in most markets but it is there on the ground and so this is part of the fabric of people's lives if you go into parts of DC you'll see payday lenders and check cashing joints well I don't know if check either those are legal in the district but you get the point they're there and we don't have great data on that in most markets so I think we're fortunate we were able to see that in South Africa I know that's there in other countries but I don't know where you get the data for that before launching the Spinnaker project we took a look at this question pretty closely and conducted a landscape of where all the data existed and two of the players in this space were pretty much really pioneers in this space and when it came to product level data they're pretty what we notice is that there's very little data being collected in many ways some of the different research initiatives that we've we've done in Philippines and Kenya are just the tip of the iceberg and these are just trying to build the foundation of what is a really open space and definitely a data gap that we've seen not only in this initial landscape study but continuing in a number of different areas and I think another really interesting question when we're talking about research gaps comes around data collection sustainability and how do you make sure that the data is up to date in many respects and I think that a lot of times as Scott was saying data exists in these walled off gardens and not only do they exist in walled off gardens but very quickly these issues of data integrity and how up to date the information is can really mean can really make a difference and so we've been trying to create a community around of our data to make sure that they're see the value proposition in updating their data but it's a challenge and something that we're continuing to take a look at Great, thanks everyone Anyone from the audience have a question for the panelists Yes, and please introduce yourself into the microphone My name is Lee Yang from the most basic questions, how reliable is the data and I want you to use an American system as a comparison you can see occupied Wall Street, you can see people lost their home, lost their access, lost their account so if you don't have this vision how do you want the owner of the asset to accumulate their savings and put into account or they would rather say just consume more or put the money just under the mattress Absolutely Yeah, I think this issue of data integrity is something that is really important in one of the ways that we've just tried to address this issue being as transparent as possible so a lot of times as I was saying before the data the timeliness of the data can be really important and so just on the Spinnaker website we've tried to mention this data was collected on this date sourcing the data as much as possible so we're pulling and we're compiling, we're mashing up data from the World Bank's indicators and just being really transparent about the caveats because I think you're right there are as we've seen with the RASCA accounts we don't want to try to profile an institution that doesn't have merit and is not really looking at their data as well I remember you tired commercial banker and I want to congratulate you on the data that you've gathered I think that's going to be very, very helpful going forward for as was mentioned for change of policy in Kenya and elsewhere and I think Kenya is sort of the example and everybody focusing on that is a good idea because what's done in Kenya can be duplicated elsewhere if I may I have just two questions they're kind of nuts and bolts questions from a commercial banker on where all this is going if you look at the effect of M-Presa the economy there and also their new instrument which I think is called M-Casia which is a saving instrument the M-Presa has a limitation on how much people can put into that account the M-Casia is basically a telephone or a mobile saving mechanism which is a new invention and we also see from the marvelous statistics that you showed us the incredible expansion of the commercial banking system in Kenya and you can go into small towns in Kenya and you will find branches of particularly those three leading banks that were mentioned in that survey you look at all of that and I wonder what's the effect of that easy access to banking is going to do to the funding of MFI's and co-ops will they be losing their funding base will that funding base shift into the commercial banks and into the telephone companies which have to hold that money in commercial banks or and will they be welcomed in the interbank community to borrow from that or will they have to borrow from banks as a customer these are some questions I'm really very curious about then I have another question which I guess is more to Leora Clapper when you go around into Kenya into smaller towns and you see the banking activities there and you talk to the managers and they show you their loan portfolio and their savings and everything else and I find that the savings amount but they're listed as their liabilities and their assets are quite unbalanced they're lending very little to the small towns most of that money they're quite happy to say is going back into Nairobi and if you look at the last year's report from the central bank of Kenya the highest area of lending was in real estate and we know that's not going into rural areas or into agriculture does the central bank have a role here to put in something like what we have in the United States of Community Reinvestment Act that if you're pulling deposits out of a community isn't there an obligation to re-lend back into those communities I appreciate your reviews on those things who wants to go first I can quickly touch on your question and your point about Mkesha in the report we launched today that's outside we actually have a case study on Mkesha in the partnership between Equity Bank and Mpesa and I think it's a really unique and innovative product that has gained a lot of steam and so as a gentleman was mentioning it's a savings product that's fully integrated on a mobile phone platform and actually the growth of it has been pretty rapid and so it's just something to take another look at I know there's a number of other questions but I'll let the other panelists handle those so I actually disagree a little bit I think despite the similarity of names which is a bit of a marketing coup the Mkesha has been much less successful than Mpesa Mpesa has currently about 18 million something like that accounts and Mkesha is probably around one I think it's a more complicated account but there were issues with communication between the bank and the telephone company issues is on the record right issues about bringing two big elephants together to dance in a small room shall we say it's good though because this is the private sector at work and it doesn't often work in Africa and so I think this collaboration was a useful thing to try out but there are lots of other banks and telephone companies to try as well I think your issue about your question about the basically financial intermediation but taking deposits from savers and giving them to investors is a really good one I found in my experience that equity bank seems very willing to take deposits it doesn't seem willing to lend to anyone it just buys treasury bills kind of thing I don't know the data to back that up but my kind of impression is that a lot of the bank deposits are being channeled into T bills basically and then from that to the rest of the country should there be a law that says they have to go back to the rural areas or should there be more accountability or more political representation that says if the government is getting this money to finance a deficit or to finance public spending maybe the government should be spending money in those communities on local infrastructure etc that's a difficult question Leo probably can answer it better I actually will pass on the last question we'll comment that it is supportive evidence by colleagues like Pascal Dupas and Jonathan Robinson and Kenya is showing this huge craving and demand for safe savings products and they've shown they offered adults a savings account for some entrepreneurs and take up was very high particularly by women who are often forced into involuntary loans to family and friends and found that allowing them account a safe place secure place to keep their money increase their investments in their companies as well as the profitability so I certainly all of these efforts to promote safe places for people to store their money is a important step in the right direction do we have time for one more question Jamie oh I work in the domestic side of the asset building program and I actually had a question about whether or not there's any movement across the world to have data accessible for consumers make decisions that's something that's been going on in the U.S. because most of the data you guys are talking about were on the supply side and so I was wondering if there are any other kind of data collection issues to address supply or demand side issues I should have probably included that in the spectrum of people that would be under consideration but I think for working a lot on the developing world it's sort of so far off in the horizon but that should be sort of the end of this so you have you know high level policy makers you have donors and investors then you can move to operators and practitioners but what you really ultimately want is information that's useful for customers or consumers to make financial decisions for themselves I think that's pretty far off in the future but I would see a lot of the information that you know as an American using financial services in the United States that I have accessible to me is not crazy to think would be available in the developing world for consumers there's questions about I guess financial capability and education and then the channels through which people would access that but that's there I can say one of the pieces of information that we've leveraged for the mapping in which I'm pretty enthusiastic is a realistic path is using the information that banks and other financial institutions make available for their customers so South Africa is a pretty developed and banked and we used the branch listings that they made available for their customers so just what you would go on to you know Absa Bank in South Africa and say where's the nearest branch and they would click on something and say well here it is it's next to this supermarket downtown and so that's what we utilize exactly the same information for our mapping but they needed to do that because their customers want and need that information for themselves so to the extent that that channel from the institution to their customers relies on data and data that's publicly accessible and in a usable format then I think some of this can just sort of sit back on top of it but that's a fantastic point to make that really the point of all of this is that eventually customers have either better options or the information to make better decisions for themselves great and are there any questions from our web audience I think there are a couple but for the sake of time I thought one of the most interesting was about the data on cross border economic corridors the question is about that markets that are not defined by national boundaries and the role that might play in some of these markets and some of the products that are being accessed I don't know anyone who would want to I think there's a lot of evidence that M. Pessa was used in South Sudan, Somalia Uganda over the border is that a good thing you can't stop it you can't build a wall that high but the impact I'm not sure it's hard to say what the impact is again this is I think there's a lot of anecdotal rumors floating around but no hard data on that but certainly something we pick up which was quite surprising is and there's a nice map in the report on the mobile banking penetration in other countries in Africa for example in Somalia lands we find a very high rate and in a number of other countries where we went back and there was no provider providing a formal service and so at first we got nervous about the quality of the data and Gallup actually went back into focus groups in some of these countries and seemed that there's a very active vibrant completely informal market of sending minutes I mean from both remittances but also employers saying workers in the next village by sending the minutes and that's how formalized this informal market has been and I think this is something that policy makers and private sector should be aware of and hopefully our data shines a light on this doesn't fully answer the question but one thread that might be relevant for it is the sort of the rise of the regional banking networks in Sub-Saharan Africa so there's a lot of cross country banks that have holding companies in subsidiaries so equity bank has I forget Rwanda they have affiliates in other countries Eco Bank Bank of Africa, yeah they all have affiliates across country it's not exactly I think what the questioner is getting at about cross borders but that's something I think would be important to the extent that there's multinational institutions providing services in different countries that's both a challenge opportunity for looking at this I'm looking at you but this is a person in cyberspace sorry okay great and I'll over set my role as moderator to share that M-Pesa does have a partnership with Western Union so people in the UK for example can send money to M-Pesa users in Kenya so there are formal established channels for cross border that leverage the mobile money distribution network and I think with that we may not have any more time for questions so I will hand it over to Jamie for closing remarks and also so that I am not the person keeping you from beer and wine but looking forward to continuing the conversation later okay and I don't want to be the person who stands between beer and wine either so I just like to take an opportunity to thank all of our panelists and our moderator for today's discussion I know that there was a list of some six or seven questions over Twitter and I know others who had their hands up that weren't able to ask questions those of you who have questions please stick around if you want have a drink and chat for those that ask questions over Twitter I wonder if we might be able to continue this conversation perhaps in the form of some sort of blog post where the panelists have an opportunity to reflect on some of the questions that have come up and you know just continue that conversation a little bit more if possible so I'll follow up with all of you on that so thanks again everybody please join me in thanking the panelists and then let's have a drink