The Regulation of banking agents to enhance financial inclusion

Abstract

Financial inclusion is an important global initiative, which seeks to ensure that everyone has access to financial services. Financial inclusion is also a key enabler to reducing extreme poverty. There is evidence that suggests that there remains a large amount of people in South Africa that are living in rural areas that still do not have access to financial services due to how further away all the traditional bank branches are from the rural areas, thus making it difficult or impossible for the undeserved or unbanked population to make use of financial services offered by banks.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the link between lack of access to financial services and the use of banking, assess the existing international benchmarks, conduct a case study on Bangladesh as good example of a country that has implemented the agent banking model and assess whether the existing legislation in South Africa allows for the implementation of the agent banking model.