Groups of services delivered by Brazilian branchless banking and respective network integration models

Over the last decade, Brazil has pioneered an innovative model of branchless banking, known as correspondent banking, involving distribution partnership between banks, several kinds of retailers and a variety of other participants, which have allowed an unprecedented growth in bank outreach and became a reference worldwide. However, despite the extensive number of studies recently developed focusing on Brazilian branchless banking, there exists a clear research gap in the literature. It is still necessary to identify the different business configurations involving network integration through which the branchless banking channel can be structured, as well as the way they relate to the range of bank services delivered. Given this gap, our objective is to investigate the relationship between network integration models and services delivered through the branchless banking channel. Based on twenty interviews with managers involved with the correspondent banking business and data collected on almost 300 correspondent locations, our research is developed in two steps. First, we created a qualitative taxonomy through which we identified three classes of network integration models. Second, we performed a cluster analysis to explain the groups of financial services that fit each model. By contextualizing correspondents’ network integration processes through the lens of transaction costs economics, our results suggest that the more suited to deliver social-oriented, “pro-poor” services the channel is, the more it is controlled by banks. This research offers contributions to managers and policy makers interested in understanding better how different correspondent banking configurations are related with specific portfolios of services. Researchers interested in the subject of branchless banking can also benefit from the taxonomy presented and the transaction costs analysis of this kind of banking channel, which has been adopted in a number of developing countries all over the world now.     

Mobile banking in the government-to-person payment sector for financial inclusion in Pakistan*

ABSTRACT

Whilst there have been growing interest and efforts by governments in developing countries to disburse digital government-to-person (G2P) payments to promote financial inclusion, the role of mobile banking in the receipt of social cash remains under-researched. Through an interpretive case study of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) in Pakistan, this paper applies Orlikowski’s Duality of Technology that critically examines mobile banking usage by women beneficiaries and technology's effects on the institutional properties of their households. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews from participants located in Pakistan. The findings highlighted that mobile banking enabled women to receive the full amount of grants, securely and conveniently, from agents. However, mobile banking imposed human, socio-economic and technological constraints which restricted women's access to and usage of financial services that limited financial inclusion. Women were socially and politically empowered, thereby, social inclusion was transformative. This paper theoretically contributes to the Duality of Technology framework that was deterministic for women beneficiaries. The study accentuates the redesign of mobile banking to match women's capabilities, and imparting financial and digital training to them. Also, the provision of a range of financial resources to beneficiaries may steer micro-entrepreneurial activities to advance the inclusion agenda in Pakistan.     

Documenting the accessibility of 100 US bank and finance websites

Universal Access in the Information Society - Digital access to banking and financial systems is no longer merely a way to augment physical transactions or experiences. It is now the primary way...     

ICT‐equipped bank boat and the financial inclusion of the riverine population of Marajó Island in the Brazilian Amazon

The challenge in offering public services in less developed areas in Brazil has mobilized the government in search of new and creative approaches that can reduce major interregional disparities, including lack of access to the financial system, which is the prevailing situation on Marajó Island in the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon. To transform this reality, an information and communication technology (ICT)–equipped travelling bank branch installed on a boat—named Agência Barco—was designed for the purpose of meeting the financial needs of the riverine population that lives in a vast territory with low population density, marked transportation difficulties, and a limited supply of ICT. Thus, this research aims to assess the impact of this bank boat in the financial inclusion of a riverine population of Marajó Island in the state of Pará, which is the unit of analysis of this work. The research outcomes indicate that Agência Barco, via ICT, has partially managed to provide access to financial products and services that might be of interest to the riverine population of Marajó Island. However, the lack of basic financial education and context‐based issues related to the ICT infrastructure has been obstacles to the financial inclusion of this riverine population. Finally, the absence of involvement of local people in this endeavour has not stimulated dynamics of empowerment and participation that could lead to sustainable financial inclusion.     

网上银行的安全问题及对策

网上银行以网络技术为手段,向客户提供信息服务和金融交易服务,是一种新兴的银行服务模式,给用户办理银行业务提供了快捷和便利。通过对网上银行发展的现状和存在的安全问题进行分析,提出了解决网上银行安全问题的对策建议,旨在促进网上银行健康有序地发展。     

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Biometric identification,financial inclusion and economic growth in India: does mobile penetration matter?

ABSTRACT

Using data on major Indian states during 2001–2014, the paper analyzes the impact of AIM (Aadhaar, Inclusion and Mobile) trinity on economic growth. Using advanced panel data techniques, the evidence suggests that mobile penetration exerts a positive and statistically significant impact on economic growth. In addition, there exist strong complementarities between mobile telephony and financial inclusion. The magnitude of the complementarity is significantly higher in case of financial use as compared with financial access. In addition, the evidence points to the fact that biometric identification process (Aadhaar) is making its impact felt on financial inclusion, primarily by improving financial access.     

On the Computational Complexity of Measuring Global Stability of Banking Networks

Threats on the stability of a financial system may severely affect the functioning of the entire economy, and thus considerable emphasis is placed on the analyzing the cause and effect of such threats. The financial crisis in the current and past decade has shown that one important cause of instability in global markets is the so-called financial contagion, namely the spreadings of instabilities or failures of individual components of the network to other, perhaps healthier, components. This leads to a natural question of whether the regulatory authorities could have predicted and perhaps mitigated the current economic crisis by effective computations of some stability measure of the banking networks. Motivated by such observations, we consider the problem of defining and evaluating stabilities of both homogeneous and heterogeneous banking networks against propagation of synchronous idiosyncratic shocks given to a subset of banks. We formalize the homogeneous banking network model of Nier et al. (J. Econ. Dyn. Control 31:2033–2060, 2007) and its corresponding heterogeneous version, formalize the synchronous shock propagation procedures outlined in (Nier et al. J. Econ. Dyn. Control 31:2033–2060, 2007; M. Eboli Mimeo, 2004), define two appropriate stability measures and investigate the computational complexities of evaluating these measures for various network topologies and parameters of interest. Our results and proofs also shed some light on the properties of topologies and parameters of the network that may lead to higher or lower stabilities.     

Out-of-band federated authentication for Kerberos based on PANA

Nowadays, network operators and educational and research communities are extending the access to their Internet application services to external end users by deploying, with other domains, the so-called identity federations. In these federations, end users use the identity and authentication credentials registered in their home organizations for accessing resources managed by a remote service provider. However, current identity federation solutions focus mainly on assisting network access and web services, while a significant number of services are left aside (e.g., SSH, FTP, Jabber, etc.). Taking advantage of the widespread adoption of Kerberos by current application services, this paper presents a solution to provide federated access to any kind of application service by using existing Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) infrastructures. The solution bootstraps a security association, in the service provider which enables the acquisition of a Kerberos credential to access the service. To link the end user authentication with the AAA infrastructure and the bootstrapping of the security association the solution uses the so-called Protocol for Carrying Authentication for Network Access (PANA).     

Decision support system for economic assessment of water improvements in remote,low-resource settings

Since most people without access to safe water services live in remote areas of developing countries, assessing the economics of rural water developments poses a globally pressing challenge. This study seeks to: (1) outline the rural (non-networked) water development decision process in a systematic way; (2) incorporate that process into a modeling tool in order to conduct consistent economic analysis of developments across a wide range of contexts, and (3) assess the performance and potential applications of this tool. We introduce AWARE, a recently developed Decision Support System, to provide a generalized model of the processes and constraints related to the advancement of rural water services. AWARE enables robust comparisons to be made across a wide range of social, economic, physical, technical and management approaches. We demonstrate that it performs adequately, and propose that, despite its generalized approach, it will be useful for informing both development strategies and field projects.     

A Hierarchical Location Model for Locating Bank Branches in a Competitive Environment

Recent developments in the provision of banking services are expected to affect the structure and the organization of modern banks significantly. Consequently, it has become necessary for most banks to reorganize their service network. In this context we demonstrate how demand–covering models may be combined with geographical information systems (GIS) to determine the optimal location of bank branches, taking into account the various factors that characterize local conditions within the demand area. The essence of the proposed models is to employ a GIS to represent various criteria concerning the demand for banking services (geographical, social, economic, etc.) as well as the competition in each particular area. This information is then taken into account by appropriate demand–covering models which determine the locations that achieve the maximum capture of the demand. Finally, we present some initial results concerning the application of this approach by a major Greek commercial bank.     

Determinants of behavioral intention to mobile banking

With the improvement of mobile technologies and devices, banking users are able to conduct banking services at anyplace and at anytime. Recently, many banks in the world have provided mobile access to financial information. The reason to understand what factors contribute to users’ intention to use mobile banking is important issue of research. The purpose of this research is to examine and validate determinants of users’ intention to mobile banking. This research used a structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the causalities in the proposed model.The results indicated strong support for the validity of proposed model with 72.2% of the variance in behavioral intention to mobile banking. This study found that self-efficiency was the strongest antecedent of perceived ease-of-use, which directly and indirectly affected behavioral intention through perceived usefulness in mobile banking. Structural assurances are the strongest antecedent of trust, which could increase behavioral intention of mobile banking. This research verified the effect of perceived usefulness, trust and perceived ease-of-use on behavioral intention in mobile banking. The results have several implications for mobile banking managers.     

Understanding resilience in slums using an agent-based model

The existence of slums or informal settlements is common to most cities of developing countries. In India, slums contain a wealth of diversity that is masked by a high level of poverty and insufficient access to resources. Recent studies have identified that it is important to assess the resilience of slums as they differ from one slum to another. While many slums are vulnerable to forced evictions, temporary jobs, and constant migration; few slums can respond and recover from external shocks and stress. In this paper, we investigate the resilience of slums based on novel field data from 37 slums in Bangalore. Specifically, we develop an agent-based model to understand how existing social, economic and environmental situation impacts the choices of slums. The paper makes two important findings. First, we find a high social satisfaction has a stabilizing effect, which means that despite more attractive economic opportunities, social satisfaction the slum dwellers derive from living in the neighbourhood of similar contacts is a strong motive to stay. However, given that a lack of economic opportunities causes a decline in the population, the social satisfaction will decrease as a function of the number of social contacts that move. We show that this cascading effect of emigrating population strongly depends on group identity such as religion. Second, we detect different regimes as social satisfaction increase, the population transitions from extinction to positive density dependence to density independence. Therefore, understanding the social capital of a slum community can offer insights into the ability of a slum to recover from external perturbations.     

Harnessing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to address urban poverty: Emerging open policy lessons for the open knowledge economy

Urban poverty is a complex socio-economic problem. The expected doubling of the urban population relative to rural areas by 2050 without a corresponding economic and infrastructure growth will worsen the problem, especially in emerging economies. Poor urban residents face rising unemployment and underemployment, constrained access to financial services, market exploitation, poor housing, crime, unsatisfactory health services and scant education opportunities. Several players have attempted to address these problems through information and communication technologies. This paper isolated a few of these to determine critical success factors on the economic empowerment front.     

Providing efficient SSO to cloud service access in AAA-based identity federations

The inclusion of cloud services within existing identity federations has gained interest in the last years, as a way to simplify the access to them, reducing the user management costs, and increasing the utilization of the cloud resources. Whereas several federation technologies have been developed along the years for the Web world (e.g. SAML, Oauth, OpenID), non-web application services have been largely forgotten. The ABFAB IETF WG was created to define an architecture and a set of technologies for providing identity federation to non-Web application services, such as the cloud. ABFAB provides a way to use the existing EAP/AAA infrastructure to perform federated access control to any kind of application service, thanks to the definition of a new GSS-API mechanism called GSS-EAP. However, the ABFAB architecture does not define an efficient way of providing SSO. This paper defines a way to include such an SSO support into ABFAB, by introducing the required extensions to make use of the EAP Re-authentication Protocol (ERP), the IETF standard for providing fast re-authentication in EAP. Moreover, to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed extensions, we have implemented a proof-of-concept based on Moonshot, the open-source implementation of ABFAB, and OpenStack as an example of cloud service. Finally, using this prototype we have completed a performance analysis that compares our proposal with the standard ABFAB operation. This analysis confirms the substantial reduction in terms of computational time and network traffic that can be achieved using ERP for providing efficient SSO to cloud service access in ABFAB-based identity federations.     

Making the world a better place with fintech research

Financial technology (fintech) is seen as possessing significant potential to provide the poor access to financial services and help them escape the clutches of poverty. Surprisingly, Information Systems (IS) research has engaged little with fintech's promise of fostering financial inclusion for the poor. In the spirit of ‘making a better world with ICTs’, conducting ‘responsible IS research for a better world’ and ‘understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research’, we advance a framework for guiding IS research on fintech-led financial inclusion. Drawing on the IS literature and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) scholarship, we extrapolate five areas of research that can better illuminate fintech's contributions to financial inclusion: (a) business strategies for fintech-led financial inclusion; (b) digital artifacts of fintech-led financial inclusion; (c) business environment of fintech-led financial inclusion; (d) microfoundations of fintech for financial inclusion; (e) developmental impacts of fintech. We conclude with a discussion of how the five areas offer opportunities for impactful research on fintech and the promise of building a financially inclusive society.     

Online social networking and psychological experiences: The perceptions of young people with mental health difficulties

ObjectivesThis study explores the interaction between online social networking experiences and wellbeing in 12 young people accessing mental health services.MethodsData from semi-structured interviews was analysed using Grounded Theory methodology.Results“Threats and judgement” and “connection and support” were experienced by adolescents, facilitated by having continuous access to a vast social network. These experiences influenced adolescents' psychological wellbeing, mediated by their responses to threat and judgement and maintaining “safe sharing” with their network. Social network use was conceived as a gamble of balancing its potentially positive and negative impact in a culture in which social network use appears to be unavoidable.ConclusionsThe findings indicate the importance of routine assessment and formulation of social networking use in understanding adolescents' psychological distress. Furthermore, a range of opportunities exist for clinicians to utilise the anonymity and peer support that social networks offer to broaden the range of mental health services offered to young people.     

Technology-driven information sharing and conditional financial development in Africa

ABSTRACT

Information technology is increasingly facilitating mechanisms by which information asymmetry between lenders and borrowers in the financial sector can be reduced in order to enhance financial access for human and economic development in developing countries. We examine conditional financial development from ICT-driven information sharing in 53 African countries for the period 2004–2011, using contemporary and non-contemporary quantile regressions. ICT is measured with mobile phone penetration and internet penetration, whereas information-sharing offices are public credit registries and private credit bureaus. The following findings are established. First, there are positive effects with positive thresholds from ICT-driven information sharing on financial depth (money supply and liquid liabilities) and financial activity (at banking and financial system levels). Second, for financial intermediation efficiency, the positive effects from mobile-driven information sharing are apparent exclusively in certain levels of financial efficiency. Third, with regard to financial size, mobile-driven information sharing is positive with a negative threshold, whereas internet-driven information sharing is positive exclusively among countries in the bottom half of financial size. Positive thresholds are defined as decreasing negative or increasing positive estimated effects from information-sharing offices and vice versa for negative thresholds. Policy implications are discussed.     

Systematic sampling is a minimum support design

In order to select a sample in a finite population of N units with given inclusion probabilities, it is possible to define a sampling design on at most N samples that have a positive probability of being selected. Designs defined on minimal sets of samples are called minimum support designs. It is shown that, for any vector of inclusion probabilities, systematic sampling always provides a minimum support design. This property makes it possible to extensively compute the sampling design and the joint inclusion probabilities. Random systematic sampling can be viewed as the random choice of a minimum support design. However, even if the population is randomly sorted, a simple example shows that some joint inclusion probabilities can be equal to zero. Another way of randomly selecting a minimum support design is proposed, in such a way that all the samples have a positive probability of being selected, and all the joint inclusion probabilities are positive.     

Collectivistic health promotion tools: Accounting for the relationship between culture,food and nutrition

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers are increasingly examining how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can help people eat more healthfully. However, within HCI, there has been little examination of the way that cultural values influence how people think about food and wellness, and how sociocultural context supports or impedes attempts to eat healthfully. Our work focuses on the diet-related health challenges of African Americans within low-income neighborhoods. This population disproportionately experiences diet-related disease, and as such, researchers have consistently advocated research that examines the way in which food practices are culturally situated.Through formative focus groups with 46 participants we identified several design implications for tools that promote healthy eating while accounting for collectivism, a cultural value often ascribed to the African American population. Based on our design implications we developed, deployed and evaluated two systems that supported the sharing of community-held knowledge about making healthy eating decisions. In our discussion, we present implications for the design of collectivistic systems that address food practices. We conclude with recommendations for HCI research that investigates the relationship between culture and food more broadly.