The paper also notes, however, that several major challenges to mobilising rural deposits exist. The main ones cited:

• Building rural inhabitants' trust in the financial institutions, sufficient to encourage deposits;
• Designing demand-driven, rural deposit services that can be delivered in a profitable manner;
• Identifying investment opportunities in technologies to significantly reduce costs of doing business in rural areas, resulting from low population density and poor physical infrastructure.

The paper begins by discussing in more detail the key challenges in rural savings mobilisation highlighted above. Alongside this it sets out important recent innovations that can be used to help mitigate these issues:

• Enhancing existing networks and institutional strength
• "Piggy Banking" in the Philippines
• Capitalising on remittance technology
• Open source software
• Real-time fund transfers
• Personal digital assistants
• Cell phone banking

• Build on existing networks, local strengths
• Respond to the needs and customs of rural clients
• Extract the most value from costly technologies
• Identify appropriate, tailored solutions to rural infrastructure problems