Preamble

Financial inclusion will be accomplished through utilising a combination of bank-managed, third party, and client-owned resources. Only the category of resources (sales people, ATMs, automatic note acceptors, points of sale devices, retail agencies, etc.) can be geographically identified and tracked. The latter category of client-owned infrastructure (mobile phones and personal computers etc.) although providing the most cost effective and convenient access, cannot be easily identified within a specific geographic position.

Due to the above, we suggest that Access to Financial Services via these two categories of resources be measured through different methodologies.

Definition:

Points of representation:

Target market

Qualifying Areas are municipal suburbs or sub-areas in which more than 50% of households fall within LSM 1 - 5.

Measurement principles:

Measurement

Convenient Access is the presence of:

NB: To avoid any doubt, an Access Point that meets all three criteria above may be counted under all three line items of the Geographic Access scorecard. Therefore, if a Sales Point is within a 5 km radius of the qualifying area it will count under all three geographic access line items, since it has all the features of all three points of presence.

Geographic access will be evaluated in three steps:

Geographical access is specifically about proximity to Transaction, Service and Sales Points and does not imply product holding, which is covered separately in the Product Access section.

Preamble

Since access via a customer's own or third party infrastructure cannot easily be pinpointed per specific geographic area, the penetration of certain transaction types to an identified client base, on identified channels will be used as a measure of access for mobile (cell phone) banking, telephone banking, internet banking, and others.

Definition

Access via any client-owned or third party infrastructure; which will include but not be limited to, internet banking, cell-phone banking, telephone banking, or any new electronic product and / or technology.

Target market

Target Customers are individual customers who earn less than R5 000 per month (annually adjusted by CPI). Customer income should be derived from the customer's account behaviour using an agreed formula, still to be determined by an industry working committee.

Products

Qualifying transactions on products include but are not limited to, money transfers, account-to-account transfers, prepaid purchases and balance enquiries done using the customer's mobile phone, telephone, internet banking or any other new technology.

Measurement

Electronic Access will be measured at industry level but with agreed targets per individual organisation. Each organisation will be measured on their own performance against their agreed target.

Targets

As Electronic Access is a new measurement, for which no industry baseline data is available, no targets can, at this stage, be agreed. The formulae for identifying the target market, has also not been agreed, since LSM information will not be used as a base.

Other comments

It is proposed that an Industry Working Committee be convened to evaluate criteria and measurement. This is a necessity since the qualifying areas (previously national 15 km and 10 km, and qualifying points of representation (previously branch and ATM, now all inclusive) have been changed. This will necessarily result in new baseline numbers and newly identified industry gaps. These gaps will need to be addressed by the industry via all the impacted institutions. As such individual institution targets must be formulated and agreed, taking impact on capital expenditure as well as economic viability into consideration.