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> Posted by Juan Blanco, Associate, Financial Inclusion 2020, CFI
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In the client protection section of the FI2020 Roadmap to Financial Inclusion, a specific recommendation was made for financial providers to embrace consumer protection as part of their professional identity, and applying a “financial consumer bill of rights” was identified as a key action point.
Looking into the state of this industry area for our upcoming FI2020 Progress Report on Financial Inclusion, I came to realize that the subject of consumers’ bills of rights is not as straightforward as it seems. Although the recommendation from the roadmap was aimed specifically at providers, the truth is that this is an area where a diversity of players is getting involved. I found a range of approaches: codes of conduct, codes of ethics, charters of rights, and bills of rights, coming from a wide spread of stakeholders, from MFIs to global associations to governments. At the heart of each of these initiatives was the same objective: for service providers to operate ethically and responsibly.
> Posted by Alexandra Rizzi, Deputy Director, the Smart Campaign
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Close to Washington, D.C.’s antipode in Perth, Australia I attended the Fifth Annual Responsible Finance Forum, which this year focused on responsible digital finance. The organizers assembled an impressive mix of representatives from all three legs of the responsible finance stool – industry, regulators, and consumers. A number of familiar risk areas were examined during the two great days of presentations, debate, and discussion, and three prominent themes emerged for me: the centrality of the service agent, the increasing importance of financial education, and considering responsible finance at the ecosystem level.
The first day of the forum focused on the identification of risks to consumers from digital financial services (DFS) and the second day was framed around how to mitigate and minimize those risks. An online “Global Pulse Survey” that CGAP conducted as well as some demand-side research conducted by MicroSave and Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) brought both the practitioner and consumer perspectives on DFS risks to the forefront. The MicroSave and BFA research canvassed nearly 700 DFS users and 50 non-users through focus groups in Colombia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Uganda. While respondents of the survey and focus groups identified a wide variety of harms or worries, some common items emerged, listed in the table below. Though preliminary, this data is extremely important in helping us frame the areas where stakeholders could focus to mitigate against client harm and risk. These risks fall squarely into the framework of the Smart Campaign’s seven Client Protection Principles, furthering our belief that a principles framework can carry forward into digital financial services.
> Posted by Susy Cheston
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
The television comedy survived only a few months in the sixties, but it had a catchy theme song: “It’s about time, it’s about space, about two men in the strangest place.” In the show, a couple of astronauts travelled at the speed of light and accidentally went back in time instead of space. Talk about disruptive technology! The two men ended up in prehistoric times trying to make sense of life with a cave community, with predictably inane results.
The theme song came to me as I was thinking about the ways both technology and new approaches to product design are blurring the lines between time and space. It’s a neat concept to say that financial services move resources across time (credit and savings) or across space (payments). But just as those astronauts thought they were traveling in space and ended up traveling in time, technology is disrupting financial services, stripping financial services down to their basic elements and allowing those elements to be re-combined in new ways. The quartet of products we can rattle off in our sleep—credit, savings, insurance, payments—no longer have sharp boundaries as technology gives us new ways to store value and as financial services enter new markets. Susan Johnson’s recent research in Kenya showed that we sometimes don’t even know what we’re talking about when we use the words savings and payments. In Kenya, a so-called savings account turned out to serve as merely a payment device for payroll transfers. And she points out the ways experts are grappling with language as financial services encounter mobile phones, e.g. “savings” defined as “keeping money in the phone for at least 24 hours.” (Hey, I can save lots of money by that definition!) Read the rest of this entry »
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