Unbanked and underbanked never found refuge at traditional banks as they never met any of their qualifying criteria. Traditional banks also didn’t seem too keen to explore innovative viable business models that would include unbanked and underbanked. Part of this could be attributed to lack of cutting edge solutions such as artificial intelligence, advanced cloud computing capabilities, which are now fairly omnipresent.

They are increasingly being used to gather and process novel insights from structured and unstructured data.

And, remainder of this negligence could be attributed to lack of desire to find specialized ingenuous solutions for this demographic but instead to conveniently write them off.

It wasn’t until Vodafone’s M-Pesa found it’s footing in Kenya, that innovators and policy makers started acknowledging mobile banking as a great enabler for financial inclusion. Through further ingenuity and exploration, innovators with tie-ups with local private enterprises and with the help of government bodies, nurtured these sparks of insights into profitable and sustainable business models. Not many have been able to cross the chasm, so to speak, but there have been significant leaps in recent years due to commercialization of cloud computing and maturing of digital banking and payments landscape.