Leveraging Technology for the Underbanked: Brazil's Instituto Palmas

Based in Fortaleza, Brazil, Instituto Palmas (IP) is an umbrella organization supporting a network of over 100 community development banks (CDBs). IP has a strong history and reputation of serving the financial needs of low-income communities, but has also recognized that limited technological adoption is constraining its impact. IP is also motivated by the global Information Technology for Development (IT4D) movement and its efforts to use technology to improve the standard of living of low-income individuals and families. In response, IP recently launched a Research and Innovation Lab to develop cost-effective and easy-to-use technologies that will help CDBs improve their internal operations, expand their consumer product and service offerings and contribute to the social and economic wellbeing of their base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) customers.



The SIPA team was tasked with completing a global benchmark study of successful efforts to integrate technology into financial inclusion initiatives. The benchmarking study includes over 150 different initiatives, from which 16 were chosen to demonstrate technologies that IP could most feasibly replicate or adapt to address CDB and client problems. The team was also responsible for developing this Roadmap for the Lab. The value of this project is to both define the strategy of the Lab and to recommend new initiatives for the Lab to pursue, keeping in mind the Lab’s commitment to using bottom-up approaches to product development.