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Earlier this week, The New York Times published a feature on new initiatives aimed at bringing informal savings groups into the formal financial sector:
While informal lending circles among families, acquaintances, co-workers and neighbors are familiar to hundreds of millions of people all over the globe, they are rarely recognized by mainstream financial institutions.
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Boston College's Center for Retirement Research, one of the nation’s leading center on retirement studies, recently reported on the findings of USFD's work on informal finance. CRR highlighted the various types of informal financial arrangements (money guards, savings groups, saving at home, and interpersonal loans) and dug deeper into the inner workings of savings groups in particular:
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Earlier this week, both The New York Times and Vox highlighted research from the U.S. Financial Diaries focused on informal finance.
Low-income households often do not have access to formal financial services and operate in the "invisible finance sector," leaving them with no credit history...
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