Introducing Voluntary Savings

This Womens World Banking (WWB) guide aims to provide MFIs with a detailed understanding of the process of introducing savings products, from initial planning to monitoring and evaluation. The phases involved in introducing savings at an MFI include:

• Pre-planning, to help the MFI decide whether it is ready to mobilize savings;
• Planning, to learn how to conduct market, competitor and customer research, and plan for savings mobilization;
• Product and process design, to conduct market and customer research and build findings into designing appropriate products, processes and pilot;
• Pilot/test to implement, monitor, evaluate and adjust prototypes by testing them among a limited number of clients in the actual market setting;
• Roll-out and implementation to apply lessons learned from the pilot and roll out savings across branches;
• Monitoring and evaluation to evaluate the success of the savings products and services, and build a long-term vision around their development.

While this guide covers the steps required to introduce a basic voluntary savings product, it can also be used as a foundation to innovate and design new savings products to meet clients growing needs.