1. SMEs: So this is kind of old, at least in faiV terms. But it's new to me, and a good illustration of one of the fundamental ideas that underpins how I look at all research/interventions related to SMEs: Reality has a surprising amount of detail. The point the author is making is quite different from what I take from it, so let me explain a bit more. Figuring out how to run a small business, in most contexts where we care about helping people running small businesses--developing countries, marginalized groups or areas in developed countries, other people markets and regulation have failed--is really, really hard because there is a surprising amount of detail at every step in the process. Product, location, competition, marketing, production, accounting, financing, investment--all of them involve a surprising amount of detail, and lots of little ways to get things wrong. But with so much detail it's hard to figure out if something is going wrong, much less what specific thing is going wrong.
At this surprising level of detail we tend to throw programs that either only address one small detail (e.g. incentives for formalization), or lots of details spread out across many tasks (e.g. business training). In both cases we see small or negligible effects for the most part (in part because most impact evaluations of training don't have nearly enough power to detect the size of change we could reasonably expect).
That's a fairly long disquisition to set up that the next faiVLive will be on the topic of SME business training specifically. On February 20th, at 10am Eastern, David McKenzie and I will discuss what we know about SME performance, management, survival and especially training. Register to join us here.
Finally, while I remain one of the holdouts against the term "financial health" (more on that another day), here's a report from my old colleague Piotr Korynski, now at The Microfinance Centre, looking at the application of financial health to SMEs. It's definitely worth a read to start peeling back layers on the surprising level of detail required to really understand what is happening inside SMEs.

2. Cash: At this point I feel like any discussion of the death of cash should come with a mandatory voiceover of Mark Twain saying "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Here's Olivier Usher from Nesta on 2020 being a tipping point in the "cash crash." There are some interesting data points here, and more importantly, some important questions about how payment mechanisms affect behavior, or allow others to control behavior.
The virtual voiceover to this particular death of cash pronouncement is from New York City, where the city council just yesterday approved a regulation requiring all businesses in the city to accept cash as payment. That means that 3 of the 15 largest cities in the US, as well as the entire state of New Jersey have banned the death of cash.
 
3. Financial Inclusion: Financial inclusion, like cash, has frequently been confined to the dustbin of history in recent years, in favor of other terms. As I mentioned I still prefer inclusion (while noting the irony of the name of the research center I manage) but the reasons that others don't are fair and reasonable. One of the main reasons "inclusion" replaced "access" was the recognition that opening lots of dormant accounts really shouldn't count for anything. But shifting terms didn't really blunt the criticism. Here's Bhavana Srivastava and co. from MSC on when financial inclusion is not inclusive for women, and how to change that. Here's IDEO.org on essentially the same topic, looking at what it will take to include women in the financial system in Tanzania, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and India. And here's Mayada El-Zoghbi on why measures of access and inclusion don't square up with each other.
Bobbi Gray of the Grameen Foundation also has some problems with financial inclusion (sort of)--here's her list of financial inclusion "notions that must die." Of particular note is the third: financial inclusion is always positive. Keep that one in mind while you read this piece on "financial inclusion will see mass market adoption in 2020." If you're wondering what that means, I'm not sure you'll gain much insight from reading it--it's another in a long line of proclamations that "new data" is going to solve all the problems of financial inclusion. But their is one particular sentence that meant I had to link it: "one can only hope that common-sense regulations will enable these technological advances to deliver on their promise of greater financial inclusion." There are so many ways to read that sentence! And most of them aren't encouraging, but are probably right.
To illuminate that somewhat obscure criticism, here's a piece on a highly effective, yet illegal, way to make lending fairer to women. There is no such thing as "common-sense" regulation. This stuff is really, really hard--this would be a good time to go back to the link to Mayada's piece above and read it if you haven't.