Microfinance Focus, November 1, 2011: The SEEP Network has today hosted a media roundtable with leaders of some of the world’s major microsavings initiatives and discussed recent breakthroughs and obstacles in providing the poor with safe, convenient vehicles of savings. The session was a part of SEEP’s annual Conference on Microsavings and Enterprise Development.

Speaking at the session, Rosita Najmi, Program Manager for Financial Access at Birth (FAB), currently hosted by the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International said that there are real financial opportunities which are measurable and specific for all those involved in operationalizing of FAB's model.

“Let us take the example of Samoa. They have 5000 babies a year. It is a pretty good deal if a financial service provider got 5000 new savings accounts each year with an initial deposit of $100”, she said.

FAB aims to help bank the unbanked by starting financial citizenship at birth with a savings account connected to an opening deposit, universal ID, and mobile banking. “The secret sauce behind FAB is the technology, the scale, the public private partnership and the incentive that provides everyone to gain something while also doing good”, Rosita said.

Kate Druschel Griffin, Director of Grameen Foundation's Solutions for the Poorest program pointed out that getting new accounts is not necessarily a measure of success. “Opening an account does not mean that people are using it until we actually see them using those accounts. Over the last two years, we have seen a four percent growth in the average balances year on year in the Philippines. We have seen more activities in the accounts.

Highlighting reasons for this success, Griffin said, “All of this is not just because of the actual product that we are offering but it has a lot to do with the change in the customer orientation service of the bank itself. They trained their staff to better represent the product they have to offer, used technology and created a new type of field agent that purely serviced savings accounts”.

Grameen Foundation’s Microsavings initiative has helped to create over 450,000 new savers at microfinance institutions in India, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

Discussing some of the important issues in the developing countries, Dr. Rashid Bajwa Chairman of the Pakistan Microfinance Network and the CEO of the National Rural Support Programme said, “If you have a double digit inflation then it becomes a disincentive to save because the money a poor person saves today does not have a value a year later”. Microsavings products need to need to accommodate for inflation, he said.