Bank Agents: Risk Management, Mitigation, and Supervision

This Focus note draws on the experiences of supervisors in several countries where branchless banking and the use of agents is flourishing to provide evidence and analysis that may be useful to supervisors in their development of an approach suitable to their supervised institutions. The use of bank agents has the potential to significantly increase financial access by poor and underserved populations to a range of formal financial services, including savings, payments and transfers, and insurance.