$250 / Finance Available
This 4-week course on digital finance provides an introductory perspective on how credit, insurance, and savings products for the informal majority have evolved and how they operate in today’s increasingly digital world.

Digital Finance for All
Financial service providers have traditionally offered products that serve the needs of workers and enterprises in the formal economy. However, in many countries, the majority of the population earns income in the informal economy, which limits their ability to access formal financial services.
Financial institutions that have tried to build products and services to bring this underserved population into the formal financial system have faced difficulties in defining a business model that allows them to scale up and provide majority access. This course offers an introductory perspective on the possibilities that digitization brings to the informal majority; how credit, insurance, and savings products have evolved and the scalability needed to make these products suitable for clients and profitable for providers.
Why do I need this course?
This course has been developed for:
- Professionals in the financial inclusion space
- Start-up entrepreneurs looking to enter the space
- Executives in financial services who are interested in building financial products for the informal majority
- International development professionals who wish to gain a holistic understanding of digital payments and emerging digital financial services
By providing a space for discussions, debates, experience, knowledge-sharing, and exchanges of resources and tools, the course enables individuals, teams and leaders to develop a stronger, more unified understanding of digital financial services, making it an excellent complement to organizational training and professional development goals. Organizations with key goals related to digital financial services and financial inclusion are strongly encouraged to enrol.
Following the completion of the course, students will:
- Have an integrated 360-degree view of digital payments and be familiar with a standard set of concepts and vocabulary
- Be able to illustrate how credit, insurance, and savings products have evolved
- Compare business models of established and emerging players
- Analyze the impact of legal and regulatory conditions
- Discuss some of the trends developing within the financial inclusion space today.
- Confidently participate in conversations, exchange ideas
- Apply these learnings to your work through developing innovative products needed to overcome the constraints of the space while ultimately achieving profitability.
Course Curriculum
Faculty

Xavier Martin
Xavier Martín-Palomas is a Stream Lead and Experience Director at DFI. He has more than 15 years of experience in the area of development finance and financial inclusion in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and holds undergraduate degrees in Economics and Industrial Psychology and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.