Study claims Financial Identity as a Service could add $250 billion to global GDP

A report published by Oxford Economics has looked into the implications of bringing into the financial system the millions of people currently excluded from it.

One of the key ways of achieving this is to provide these people with some kind of financial identity, something that is currently denied them by their inability to qualify for a bank account. It just so happens that the sponsor of this report is Juvo, which specialises in just that. Read into that what you will, but if the methodology is rigorous and transparent then the vested interest of the sponsor needn’t be an issue.

The kind of Financial Identity as a Service (FiDaaS) Juvo offers only really applies to developing economies as that’s where pretty much the financial exclusion takes place. Among individual countries Oxford Economics identified India ($7bn GDP uplift), Indonesia ($15bn), the Philippines ($15bn), Pakistan ($9bn) and Mexico ($31bn) as the individual markets most likely to benefit from this sort of thing. A lot of the rest presumably came from Africa.

The single most important thing unbanked people lack is any kind of credit score, so it’s very difficult for potential providers of credit to make a risk assessment, which means they usually won’t bother. The direct interest to the mobile industry comes from the ability to offer more punters postpaid contracts, or even micro loans for prepaid airtime.

“These numbers only capture a conservative estimate of this market’s true potential, since many more people are underbanked,” said Anubhav Mohanty, Lead Econometrician at Oxford Economics. “The sheer scale, depth and value of this opportunity is far greater than we’ve been able to quantify here.”

“For financial institutions and the mobile telecom operators they partner with, [establishing financial identities] represents a multi-billion-dollar revenue opportunity,” said Steve Polsky, CEO of Juvo. “And for the unbanked, it opens up fair and equal access to useful financial services that wouldn’t otherwise be available to them.”

While we think it’s unlikely that Oxford Economics was going to conclude that FiDaaS is a complete waste of time (or if it had, that the report would have been published), there’s little reason to doubt the desirability of bringing more people into the global economy. The mobile sector has been looking at ways of compensating for the failings of the banking system in developing economies for years and this sort of thing looks like it could help.