A recent survey report by Claudia McKay and Mark Pickens from CGAP discusses the service scape, outreach, and pricing of 18 branchless banking providers serving over 50 million customers around the world. Here is the summary of results:

Services offered by branchless banking were as traditional as payments, airtime purchase, cash deposit, money transfer, and as innovative as microloans, micro-savings, pensions and micro-insurance. Most mobile banking providers offered the former set of services, while providers in Kenya were eager to explore new horizons and meet customer demands through the latter set of service.

Branchless banking proved to be a promising financial inclusion tool, where 5 out of the 8 providers studies (owing to data availability constrains) reached “more previously unbanked” clients compared to the largest microfinance institution in the country. It took a few years to get to this point, but the figures show branchless banking has a lot of potential.

As for pricing, it was revealed that branchless banking is on average, 19% cheaper than similar products offered by conventional banks, where the biggest price advantage was noticed in bill payment services and medium-term savings. The average monthly costs borne by clients ranged from $1 (Zap, Tanzania) to $8.2 (easypaisa, Pakistan).

In the future, branchless banking services were expected to respond to consumer demand, which goes beyond simple money transfer services, and includes interest-earning savings accounts and microloans on the mobile banking platform. The report indicated the need to invest in customer research to determine atypical needs that will drive product innovation in the microfinance sector.

Reference: McKay, C and Pickens, M . (2010). Branchless Banking 2010: Who’s Served? At What Prices? What’s Next?. Available: http://www.cgap.org/gm/document-1.9.47614/FN66_Rev1.pdf. Last accessed 15th Oct 2010.