February 9, 2016 (NEW HAVEN, CT) --- Innovations for Poverty Action announced today the beginning of a partnership with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to translate research around the world into practical insights for financial service providers engaged with underserved consumers in the U.S. and Europe. This work will be conducted in close partnership with MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

“We are thrilled to announce this new partnership with JPMorgan Chase & Co.,” said Beniamino Savonitto, Director of the Financial Inclusion Program at IPA. “This grant offers us a unique opportunity to amplify our efforts to share insights from our research spanning over 30 countries and work with financial institutions to test and scale promising strategies to foster financial inclusion.”

For more than a decade, IPA, J-PAL, and their affiliated researchers have been studying ways to improve and optimize financial products and services to bolster the financial health of low-income consumers. While still in development, this body of research has yielded a substantial number of insights with potential for both industry and policy.

“We will be using the latest insights in consumer behavior and finance to help service providers develop innovative products that better serve low-income consumers,” said Savonitto.  

The new partnership with JPMorgan Chase will focus on translating evidence into actionable steps that financial service providers can take to better meet the needs of their clients. Specifically, the $100,000 grant will allow IPA and J-PAL to publish a series of issue briefs and articles, as well as work directly with financial service providers and other interested parties to help them identify and apply insights from research to their products and operations.

“IPA is excited about this opportunity to increase the depth and breadth of the impact of its research, and is grateful to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for supporting this important work,” said Annie Duflo, Executive Director of Innovations for Poverty Action.

###

Contact:

Jeff Mosenkis, Innovations for Poverty Action: Press@poverty-action.org 203.772.2216

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a research and policy non-profit that discovers and promotes effective solutions to global poverty problems. IPA brings together researchers and decision-makers to design, rigorously evaluate, and refine these solutions and their applications, ensuring that the evidence created is used to improve opportunities for the world’s poor. To date, IPA has over 500 randomized evaluations in 52 countries, which have informed hundreds of successful programs that now impact millions of individuals worldwide. More information is available at www.poverty-action.org.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) was established in 2003 as a research center at MIT’s Department of Economics. Since then, it has built a global network of 131 affiliated professors and regional offices in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. J-PAL’s mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. It does this by working with governments, NGOs, businesses, and donors to conduct rigorous impact evaluations in the field; disseminating the lessons from research and building partnerships with policymakers; and building the capacity of practitioners to generate and use evidence. Over 202 million people have been reached by the scale-up of programs found to be effective. www.povertyactionlab.org. Find J-PAL on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.