Such articles always tend to focus on the supply side ignoring the point of view of customers - why are they un-banked? do they want to be "banked"? if not, should we incentive them to be "banked"? There are so many real problems in the world - let's identify which segments and where are suffering and yearning for more financial services before we do another article on how to help them.

We recently launched https://www.SaveOnSend.com with a similar logical premise that low-income consumers are suffering from high remittance fees and looking for better ways to send money. But we have learned so far that educating them about a much less expensive method of sending money (typically, switching from a cash agent to online) rarely results in the immediate switch. And it is not because our users don’t have a bank account or a smartphone, most of them do. They just prefer using "cash" and their “cash agent” and are willing to pay 3-5-10 times more for that (see attached for comparison in margins between 2 methods)