Enterprise mobility is a modern-day business model that enables professionals to work remotely using personal computers, laptops, and mobile devices. Cloud enables data access from anywhere, anytime. This brings in productivity and agility to business processes. This shift from the legacy systems has enabled businesses to overcome their physical restrictions and increase market penetration to scale up faster.
The finance industry particularly has seen a broader acceptance of Mobility solutions due to ease of transactions and enhanced security. From payments to loans, a major part of the transactions that take place today are entirely digital.
All this is not without reason. In addition to providing convenience to the users, mobility solutions enable enterprises with better efficiency thereby improving their returns on investments. Let’s look at some of the benefits of mobility specific to the microfinance sector.
Benefits of Mobility for Microfinance Institutions
Improved efficiency/Reduced costs
Enabling the field operatives with mobile devices help them improve their efficiency as they go about meeting new customers, collecting information, and the like. It also reduces the stationary costs and other items that are no longer needed, significantly decreasing the costs of operations.
Customer Loyalty
Since mobile devices are portable, business correspondents can essentially carry the entire bulk of the available offers effortlessly. This enables them to provide the customers with varied options and customizations that help in creating better customer experiences, encouraging customer loyalty.
Improved Flexibility for End Users
Just like any other business, microfinance institutions need to provide an impeccable experience to build relationships with their employees. Providing multi-language functionalities and easy user interface enables the microlending institutions to empower their business correspondents with improved productivity.
Improved Service Delivery
This is an extension of the previous point. In addition to providing a better user experience, providing better service is also a key factor when it comes to user satisfaction. When you provide customer service better than your competitors, your customers will become ambassadors of your company.
How does this all connect with financial inclusion?
Good question! Read on.
How Enterprise Mobility Can Help Achieve Financial Inclusion
Financial inclusion is one of the deciding factors when it comes to measuring the development of a country. Hence, so much importance is given to it and efforts made to make sure that every citizen of the country has access to at least some sort of financial services to aid them in their endeavors.
Mobility has enabled microfinance institutions to reach out to a lot more people than ever before. It was never this easy to provide microloans or any other financial services in remote areas of the country. With its inherently disruptive nature, digitalization consumed the sector and transformed microfinance into a more ordered, more uniformed, and more efficient system with improved resources and better results.
However, there’s more that mobility can help bring in the microfinance industry to make sure that the unbanked are truly given the opportunity that they deserve.
Educating the unbanked
Education is the one thing that could make financial inclusion both easier and faster but ironically, it is also the only thing that’s standing between millions of people and proper banking services. Illiteracy, lack of financial information, and no proper resources has led to a lot of people never being aware of the services provided by the financial institutions.
Mobile solutions can provide educational content to help people find information about microfinance and related services.
Reaching places banks can’t go
Banks cannot be built everywhere whether due to lack of proper infrastructure or other reasons. Reaching out to people who live in remote corners without banks becomes difficult. Also, customers need to travel long distances for just enquiries.
When mobile solutions are added to the model, business correspondents can reach to the remotest corners and provide the people with the information to help them choose from the wide range of opportunities that are available at the microfinance platforms.
Enhanced customer understanding
With the data collected from the customers, thanks to mobile solutions, understanding customer behavior, and their preferences become a lot easier. This helps in providing customized services and offers to the customers, providing the best opportunities for them to be included.
VolkSoft is a FinTech company that has developed intelligent loan management solutions for various microfinance institutions, private banks, and business correspondents. It has helped countless microlenders in bringing down the duration of a loan cycle using mobility solutions while allowing deeper penetration into wider markets by integrating regional languages and offline mode. Find out more about their solutions here.
