Designs for Savings: Send Your Questions and Ideas to the Boulder-Bergamo Forum!

Tomorrow afternoon in Bergamo, Italy, I will be moderating a breakout session on Design for Savings at the Boulder Bergamo Forum on Access to Financial Services: Expanding the Rural Frontier. The organizers have set up a Wiki to allow those who couldn’t make it to Bergamo to still participate in the session.

At tomorrow’s session, Steve Peachey of World Savings Banks Institute and Oxford Policy Management, Ernest Aryeety from the University of Ghana and John Owens from MABS in the Philippines will discuss the parameters of small and successful savings design, including product design and enabling environment. On the wiki, you can see the outline of tomorrow’s presentation and look through supporting documents posted by the panelists. Generally, the panelists will address the following problem statement:

“There are probably now some 1 1/2 billion accounts at specifically accessible finance institutions across the developing world. These are, however, spread very unevenly, such that there are five times as many developing countries with severely repressed access as there are developing countries that are approaching full access. What can practitioners (and policymakers) do to improve the supply of savings services from these institutions, particularly to the rural poor?”

In the asset-building field, we have a strong sense of the demand for and need to design effective savings products for poor, low and moderate-income households. But so far at this forum focusing on rural access to finance, a discussion of savings still largely takes a backseat to credit and insurance products.

With so much energy currently in the field for savings around the globe, as a moderator of this session, I would be remiss to not provide a space to bring in the input from those who are not here, but are innovating (or wanting to) in this area. So, I am inviting readers to comment with your own questions for the presenters. Even better, send in your ideas on a) research questions and b) policy opportunities or challenges to overcome. What innovations have you seen that have worked? What is stifling innovation?

You can comment here on the Ladder on the wiki, and I will be sure your questions and ideas are reflected here tomorrow.