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> Posted by Dave Grace, Managing Partner, Dave Grace & Associates

The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”

“Pushing financial access is great, but what are clients being pushed into?” This has been the common refrain I’ve heard from regulators in Basel, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, and central bankers in the Caribbean, where I’m sitting now when I talk about the prospects for full financial inclusion within the decade. Given what the financial communities in Europe, India, and the U.S. have been through, we should not be surprised by this common-sense reaction. Consumer protection must be a key component of the Financial Inclusion 2020 platform. Together with a team of policy, technology, regulatory, and financial institution executives, and a former lobbyist for financial cooperatives (um, me), we’ve developed a framework of actionable recommendations that seek to balance access with protection.

We, in the FI2020 Client Protection Working Group, can foresee that even in a state of full financial inclusion, incentives persist for providers to look out for their own interests at the expense of clients, due to certain information, power, and structural imbalances in financial services. The challenge of client protection therefore is to reduce these imbalances and provide countervailing incentives or requirements for positive behavior.

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