Topics Inclusive finance

Wage Digitization Digest

The Wage Digitization Digest was a monthly desk-based intelligence report produced by Synergos from May 2020 – June 2021 that sourced from English-language media spanning a monthly timeframe specified in the digest. The report covered the impact on workers during…

Women and money: Insights and a path to close the gender gap

This report discusses findings from human-centred design research around the use of cash-in and cash-out services conducted with 400 persons in Bangladesh, India, Northern Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania, including about 250 women. It presents the key challenges women face,…

The rise of ‘fringetech’: Regulatory risks in earned-wage access

In the absence of regulatory guardrails, some earned wage access programs can perpetuate, and in some instances exacerbate, the very risks providers claim to eliminate when displacing short-term creditors like payday lenders. This article proposes a federal-level regulatory framework based…

Earned wage access and the end of payday lending

This article analyses the earned wage access market, assesses the likelihood that it will displace payday lending, and reveals some of the dangers lurking beneath the low-cost surface of these transactions. It argues that earned wage access products have the…

Fintech’s role in exacerbating or reducing the wealth gap

This article synthesizes research about the long-term costs of debt inequality on communities of colour in the United States of America, adding an in-depth analysis of several new advances in banking and lending, and proposing several key principles for reducing…