Big Data for Financial Inclusion and Poverty Mapping

Leveraging access to IFC clients, the project will collect data such as call detail records and (mobile) financial transaction data from Mobile Network Operators and Financial Institutions to understand customer profiles. Using sophisticated econometric techniques and cloud computing (e.g. Amazon Web Services), the project will crunch around 100,000 GB of data. The expected results will be used to determine which variables are significantly correlated to usage of (mobile) financial services to determine profiles of likely users and lists of concrete individuals who have a high likelihood score. This intelligence can then be used for product development and marketing by WBG partners to increase the supply of financial services to the previously unbanked. Through the integration of experimental evaluation techniques with several rounds of household surveys and big data collection, the team will measure the impact of using financial services on household expenditure as well as produce innovative poverty maps.