Emerging Technologies for Emerging Markets

In recent years there is intense criticism of the exploitative interest rates charged to borrowers of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Development specialists and researchers have found incidences of usurious lending rates being levied upon the unbanked population, ironically in an attempt to lift them out of poverty. The borrowers suffer greater indebtedness and take extreme measures to repay while others just defaulted. One important reason for the high lending interest rates is the transaction cost or sometimes called administrative cost or operating expenses. It presupposes that high lending interest rates are necessary to cover the transaction and administrative expenses (TAE) of providing many small loans and monitoring many small borrowers. Thus this paper aims to identify the cost drivers and the cost of the MFI transactions and administration by using activity based costing (ABC). Thereafter a mobility solution is designed to replace the manual processes to lower the TAE, which in turn reduces lending rates charged to MFI borrowers. A pilot project has been started in Indonesia to test the hypothesis.

Bank rating is as old as bank regulatory authorities. The most common approach to bank rating is on-site examination. The bank supervision authority conducts an audit of physical bank records and documents and other observations. In particular, the on-site examination looks at the bank’s assets, capital structure, management ability and professionalism of the bank practices. A summary rating is assigned based on this examination. This approach was reported in 1974 in a publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This rating system was called into question for the first time during the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of the 1997 that affected South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia. IMF painfully restructured the South Korean economy. Thailand suffered a severe outflow of funds and banks collapsed. The entire Indonesian banking system had to be revamped. Then the global financial crisis struck in 2007–2008, where the western world was hit harder than the AFC that led to the collapse of venerable financial institutions such as Lehman Bros and Bear Sterns. This begs the question: why bank ratings did not, or cannot, forewarn imminent failures in the banking system. In 2009, it was reported that banks were usually rated higher if they had greater capitalization, larger assets, and higher return on assets and equity. In 2013, in a most scathing attack on bank ratings, it stated that most failing banks had enjoyed investment status ratings just before they defaulted. This paper revisits the age-old CAMEL model and its derivatives, and a more recent EAGLES framework that alerted the Asian Financial Crisis of the 1990s. Based on the experiences of two crises in the last two decades, what lessons did we learned, especially on the early warning signals, contagion effect, information transparency and the availability of technology processes to collect and harness critical information.

The financial inclusion of women micro entrepreneurs is both important and necessary for the holistic socio-economic development of a nation. This paper aims to address the gap in the study of the processes of financial inclusion by women micro-entrepreneurs in Indonesia. The research will contribute to the pool of academic resources related to financial inclusion, micro credit, and women entrepreneurship that intend to improve the processes and benchmarking for financial inclusion initiatives. In writing this paper, there was extensive literature research plus in situ research conducted in Indonesia. There is also a significant amount of evidence that is related to factors that contribute to gender inequality. Both desk research and field research found that financial exclusion is linked to financial education, cultural norms of rural Indonesia and high banking cost and mobile payments. In conclusion, the authors recommend improving processes in designing financial products and financial education, and lowering the cost of banking, especially in the use of mobile payment technology, and instituting micro-insurance. Further research is recommended to generate hypotheses relating to financial inclusion and women entrepreneurship in Indonesia.

MFIs have a high interest rate burden due to the small monetary amount per transaction of microcredit and an inevitably high operating cost per transaction. To ensure financial viability and to expand the depth and breadth of their operations, MFIs have to adopt cost recovery interest rates on microcredit, hence MFIs have to charge interest rate high enough, usually substantially higher than the bank loan risk free interest rate. The major factors in determining the interest rate on microcredit are the cost of funds, operating costs, loan loss cost and capital for business expansion. To illustrate the impacts of the above factors on interest rate, we present a summary of the current cost structures of MFIs in three Southeast Asia countries, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Then, we shall review existing studies and propose new uses of mobile technologies and financial market innovations for lowering interest burden.

Banking is essential to modern economies, yet nearly half of the world’s people are unbanked and underserved by banks. This is mainly due to the high operating costs of banks that are passed on to retail customers, driving away customers who are not able to afford the high service costs. Without having access to the financial system the unbanked and rural poor have little means to engage in mainstream economic activities. In this chapter, we present a low-cost mobile phone-based core-banking system. This system was designed to provide retail banking services to the world’s unbanked population and rural poor of 2.2 billion based on a cashless banking system that reduces operating cost and lending risks and therefore lower the current exorbitant rates charged on retail lending and micro-credit. Our analysis and evaluation shows that the mobile core-banking system on a low-cost mobile device (an Android tablet) is able to serve over 15,000 micro-banking customers. The system is therefore suitable for retail banks or microfinance institutions.

In this chapter we would like to share new emerging technologies that are changing the way we access medical care. Despite the rural development and modernization of the way of life, the cost burden of medical care and access to medical care has become a central concern for both developed and underdeveloped countries. The number of people admitted to hospitals and medical expenditures have doubled over the past 10 years. Since the invention of radio, television, and computer, various attempts such as telemedicine have been made for improving access to medical care. Telemedicine is still being actively developed and utilized in developed countries, but its main purpose is to allow medical specialists to remotely diagnose or operate on patients. However, our focus here is the other aspect of accessibility: reducing the cost of medical care by using computerized medical services. We can broadly categorize computerized health care services into four categories: (1) tele-health, (2) automated diagnosis and assessment of health, (3) online health support, and (4) health information management systems. We review the latter three approaches: automated health care systems, highlighting the potential power of each in solving current health care problems.

Global cell-phone ownership has surpassed over 5 billion. The proliferation of cell phones offers an unprecedented opportunity for aid organizations and governments in developing countries for providing affordable medical services for everyone. The available standardized interfaces of low-cost cell-phones allow us to create powerful medical diagnostics systems. For instance, digital cameras of cell phones now provide easy to use interfaces for capturing useful information of various medical conditions. However, photographic images often contain private and sensitive personal information in its raw form thus considered unsuitable for many available online services. Therefore, there is a need for a computational algorithm for extracting anonymous, de-identified, digital features from captured images for assessing medical conditions and general personal wellbeing. We present a de-identified feature generation method, called Gaussian Hamming Distance (GHD). We show that GHD features are significantly correlated with personal wellbeing. Its low computational complexity makes it ideal to be used with low-cost mobile devices. Its prediction power is suitable for providing a variety of online services including recommending useful health information for improving general wellbeing.

Respiratory conditions, such as pneumonia, cold, flu, and bronchitis, are still the leading causes of child mortality in the world. One solution for alleviating this problem is to develop affordable respiratory assessment methods using computerized respiratory-sound analysis. This chapter illustrates how computers can be used to automatically diagnose various respiratory health problems. We use an enhanced perceptual and cepstral feature set (PerCepD) for analysing breathing sounds (BSs) for identification and classification of respiratory health problems. Classification models are developed using support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) to achieve automatic detection from BS data. The high detection accuracy results validate the performance of the proposed feature sets and classification models. The experimental results also demonstrate that the high accuracy of the pathological BS data can provide reliable diagnostic suggestions for breath disorders, such as flu, pneumonia and bronchitis.

One of the challenges in providing medical services over the network connections is maintaining authenticity and integrity of the data that are transmitted over the network and stored on remote servers. To provide critical medical services, data must be free from tempering. Medical data often also contain sensitive information, and therefore require a method to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information of patients. In this chapter, we illustrate how the methods developed for the protection of copyright can be used to achieve this. In particular, we illustrate how a watermarking scheme can be used for protecting breath sounds transmitted over the internet. We illustrate how this method can be used to insert encrypted source and identity information in breath sounds while maintaining significant biological signals for proper diagnosis. The method can be applied to any types of data including image, video, and sound data. We show experimental results to demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme obtains good robustness against common manipulation attacks and preserves imperceptivity. The performance comparison results verify that the scheme outperforms existing approaches in terms of robustness and imperceptibility.

Supporting diverse and rapidly changing learning styles of new digital age generations is a major hurdle in the age of massification of education markets. The institutions must now utilize the unprecedented network speed and mobile technology to stimulating learning environments for the new digital age generations. Institutions need to accommodate different learning styles of students often comprising of working professionals, different age groups and students from cultural backgrounds. Researchers have been trying solve these challenges through flexible learning and blended learning approaches. Faced with new digital age generations, unprecedented network speed and mobile technology, researchers now frequently quote mobilized curriculum, social-interaction oriented learning, personalized learning and collaborative mobile learning. This chapter reviews relevant education models, learning styles, literature, and technology to help identify new emerging research problems and research methodologies in m-learning.

According to UNESCO’s final figures for 2009, since 2000 the number of international students has increased by 75 %. The number of international students in Singapore is also expected to grow at 10 % annual rate reaching 150,000 in 2015. This number of students, according to a government’s foresees, is worth USD 5 billion and contributes to 2 % of GDP. As a result, there are various great opportunities coming up for higher learning education in Singapore. Singapore has become one of the most favourite destinations for international students for higher education; its growth rate is surpassing the traditionally favoured Western countries, such as US. International students have also become an important economic factor. According to former researches related to education, students are usually influenced by the surrounding sources of information as well as their own experiences. Besides, institutional factors such as program type, reputation, location, and facilities are also considered when students choose their higher learning institutes. Other studies also recognized the extreme importance of several country factors such as living condition, and safety that may affect students when they consider a destination for their study abroad. This chapter aims to examine the sources of information that international students in Singapore consider in order to choose Singapore as their study abroad destination. Additionally, the study also compares the importance of country factors and institutional factors. We have surveyed 234 students who are currently studying in Singapore to find out the competitive advantage of Singapore Tertiary Education. The results show that recommendations from friends and teachers have major influence on students’ decision in choosing their schools (higher education) and location of education, followed by country factors, such as personal security. Surprisingly, schools’ promotional activities and agents have limited influence on students’ decision making.

This chapter reports a new simulated smart learning environment, called Mobile Collaborative Experiential Learning (MCEL). MCEL provides automated, continuous, personalized, and formative feedback. Students interact with the simulated learning system via simple text messages using mobile devices in order to change the state of the system to a desired state over time. In the process, students engage in complex problem solving activities, and the system provides continuous formative assessment to help the students achieve learning objectives. Unlike conventional summative assessment approaches, students acquire set competency levels during their journey to achieving certain goals while interacting with the simulated system. MCEL allows instructors easily define learning journeys using event-condition-action (ECA) rules and reliable structured-text parser. A pilot study of MCEL is conducted and evaluated on a group of twenty Masters-in-IT students. Their participation is observed and a survey is conducted. The evaluation results show that MCEL supports Bigg’s constructive alignment in curriculum design, contextualized experimental learning, and personalized formative learning.

Education and access to information are important factors for improving the livelihoods of rural communities and in the development of human resources in developing countries. Conventional approaches to education via schools and other government facilities, such as public libraries and post offices, are too slow to be adopted widely by communities. Recent progress in telecommunications technologies has now opened new opportunities to accelerate the process at a much lower cost. This has led to active research into community and telecentre based education systems. The World Bank, UN, and UNESCO have supported such projects in many developing countries, such as India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam in collaboration with their governments. However, many rural telecentre models have been conceived and tried but met with limited success. Many of the problems with these models have been traced to the lack of proper understanding of ownership, influence, native social patterns and their impacts. We reviewed and compared rural telecentre models that had been developed and studied over the last 10 years to better understand the key social concepts. A new model was proposed and two year pilot study was conducted. We report on the effectiveness and limitations of the new model.