Savings at the Frontier – Getting closer

Savings at the Frontier (SatF) was set up in 2015 to promote formal financial service provision to savings groups and savings collectors (informal savings mechanisms (ISMs). It has partnered with nine financial service providers (FSPs) in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia to explore viable business models for reaching “the financial access frontier.” This focus note describes the low-cost, practical methods that SatF and its partner FSPs have developed to make outreach to clients in underserved areas viable. These methods build on the increasing availability of satellite images and publicly available geo-tagged data, as well as the growing ease and affordability of
collecting geo-coordinates.