For all the excitement around fintech, there is little information available about how specific fintech innovations solve pain points in financial inclusion. Based on two years of pilots with fintechs across Africa and South Asia, a new CGAP report identifies promising fintech innovations in emerging markets, challenges that startups often face in bringing them to scale, and the role that funders can play. The list of innovations is not exhaustive, but each “represents a powerful idea for financial inclusion.”

This paper documents CGAP’s work with 18 fintech pilots in Africa and South Asia. The goal of this paper is to explain innovations in a detailed way and generate insight on whether the services (i) work as stated, (ii) create value for underserved customers, and (iii) ease age-old pain points in delivering financial services to underserved customers.