As promised in the last post, here some detailed information on Colombia’s banking agents. Banca de las Oportunidades (BdO), the government entity managing the national financial sector policy, published a presentation in May 2008 on the results of banking agent networks managed by 10 Colombian financial institutions between June 2007 and May 2008.
Besides general agent numbers and transaction volumes provided by BdO, there are some interesting results when one crunches the numbers:
– As of May 2008, 10 banks are managing 4,198 banking agents in 31 departments.
– Agents processed 4.698 million transactions (77 percent of which are payments) with a value of US$ 442 million (June 2007 – May 2008 ).
– Transaction volume is highly concentrated with two banks account for 70 percent of transactions. Five banks only generate 5 percent of transactions.
– Average transaction sizes are fairly high ranging from 16 to 124 percent of monthly minimum salary (US$263).
– Transaction volume at each agent is low with only one bank reaching 57 transactions per day per agent.
– Banks started to set up agents in larger and less rural departments.
– Between July 2006 and December 2007, access to finance of Colombia’s adult population increased by 8 percent reaching 55.2 percent.
If you are interested in more information and the underlying graphs or have a question or comment, please send me an email and I send you a short presentation I wrote up. The original BdO presentation is available on their website.
