Financial Services for Young People: Prospects and Challenges

The MasterCard Foundation has explored financial services for young people by testing approaches to reaching low-income young people with financial services and education.

Financial Services for Young People: Prospects and Challenges is a review of early insights and learning based on our youth financial services projects. In this paper, which was prepared with The Boston Consulting Group, we learned about:

• The need for financial services among low-income young people;
• Promising indications of the benefits of financial access;
• The business case for providing financial services to young people;
• Where donors and social investors can deepen their focus on young people; and
• How a conducive regulatory and policy environment could be enhanced for both financial inclusion and youth development agendas.