Empowering the largest knowledge workforce on Earth.
The txteagle system enables mobile phone subscribers to accumulate savings by completing tasks. Most of our users have minimal access to formal savings instruments. Users can currently “cash-out” of our system through their phone operator’s mobile money platform (such as Safaricom’s M-PESA or Zain’s ZAP) or by receiving airtime. Our goal is to also partner with regional banks to provide users with the option of transferring their earnings into traditional bank accounts in their name. Providing a broad suite of potential payment and savings instruments provides values to our workers, and the opportunity for the banking industry to connect with historically unbanked populations.
Value to Workers
The banking industry is becoming rapidly aware that the rural poor have specific needs for financial services. To date, however, successful attempts at marketing and deploying savings solutions to this demographic have been rare.
With txteagle, workers are introduced to the concepts of savings and interest by automatically being enrolled in a savings program that requires no up-front capital expenditure. This presents an easy entry point into the world of existing banking services that may have been initially perceived as intimidating and complex.
Value to Financial Service Providers
The ability for new clients from the rural poor to automatically set up direct debit accounts can provide local banks with their first foray into this largely untapped market, without investment in any infrastructure deployments. txteagle offers the ability to expand a local banks’ client-base into this new market.
Insight Into Appropriate Savings Instruments for the Rural Poor
There is little information known about the type of desired savings instruments for the rural poor. By providing txteagle workers different options, we can start to learn how to serve this population better. Traditional savings accounts may prove useful to this population – but it may equally prove that a different savings strategy is more popular an option. By offering our users the ability to choose the type of savings plan with which they feel most comfortable, we hope to learn from these disclosed preferences and develop more suitable savings instruments designed specifically for this population.