A few colleagues and I recently travelled through Varanasi and Mirzapur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh visiting Micro Finance Institutions (MFI) in that region and their clients. I am delighted to report that this region, one of the poorest in India, is a hotbed of innovations.
Cashpor is a leading MFI operating in the region founded by Professor David Gibbons, a thought leader in the area of financial services for the poor. Operating costs in the MFI model vary between 6 – 12% and one culprit for these numbers in extensive manual data entry processes. Cashpor has deployed a remarkable mobile-based payment and reporting solution developed in partnership with Atom Technologies that replaces the paper-based data entry with real-time mobile entry and reconciliation.
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