Peter Tufano at HBS has been doing research on savings based lotteries for a while. The basic idea is that lots (generally poorer) people buy lottery tickets – the average American household spends $500 per year on lottery tickets – and it is a well known fact that we don’t…
Cap and Trade
For quite a while I’ve been thinking about the similarities between CFSI’s perspective on using market forces to mitigate poverty and the green movement. Both are double bottom line enterprises – with the ability to yield profit and social returns – which address complex, system problems, with material vested interests…
Marketing!
Today, like so many other days, I received at a call from a new company which believes to be the only one to stumble on the idea of using general purpose prepaid cards to help the underbanked live better lives. Ok, we generally agree. And today, like most other days,…
Why the underbanked
When thinking about the underbanked, it’s easy to assume there are people at the bottom of the economic pyramid who are generally underserved. What’s not so obvious is what appears as a small fringe of financially disenfranchised people, is actually a very large consumer market: over 100 million adults strong in…