On the sidelines of Ecosperity 2023 in Singapore, CIIP launched Southeast Asia’s first-ever impact-focused financial inclusion report at the Impact Investing Roundtable. The event was co-organised by CIIP and Temasek. Over 100 practitioners dedicated to social and environmental impact, including entrepreneurs, investors, and intermediaries, convened to discuss opportunities and approaches to accelerate impact investing in emerging markets through collective action.

CIIP’s report, titled “Financial Inclusion in Post-COVID Southeast Asia: Accelerating Impact Beyond Access”, outlines promising investment opportunities and successful business models and practices to accelerate positive impact for underserved regional customers through access to credit. Key report insights include:

• Women are more positively impacted by credit access and more likely to use loans for business and household well-being purposes. Lending to women can thus drive transformational change and be a crucial sector for gender-lens investing.
• There is strong correlation between the depth of impact and high customer satisfaction across regional Financial Service Providers (FSPs). Amidst growing competition, increased customer satisfaction presents a compelling business rationale for embedding impact practices in business operations.
• FSPs can achieve both impact and commercial viability through innovation and cost reduction solutions. FinTechs have shown a promising ability to reduce operating expenses in the last four years. Traditional non-banking finance institutions serving the underserved have also remained profitable, indicating that FSPs can deliver positive impact while targeting commercial returns and maintain business sustainability.

In future phases, CIIP will build on insights from this report to develop regional capacity-building initiatives, generate more insights into effective business models and actions, and dive deeper into some of the issues which require collective action.

Access the report — developed in partnership with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and Helicap, with support from 60 Decibels.