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> Posted by Alexandra Rizzi, Deputy Director, the Smart Campaign
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 Alexandra Rizzi and Sonia Arenaza, Deputy Director of the Smart Campaign and Director of Accion Channels and Technology
This is the first of two blog posts about responsible digital financial services, on the occasion of the Responsible Finance Forum in Perth, Australia.
The Smart Campaign has watched with excitement as new forms of digital financial services (DFS) stand poised to bring financial access to millions of lower-income households previously excluded from the financial system. The potential benefits of this new ecosystem are enormous and include an array of positive outcomes ranging from lowered transaction costs to consumption-smoothing, among many others. Nevertheless, the excitement over new possibilities must not obscure the need to evaluate and respond to new risks to clients.
In an ongoing mapping exercise conducted by the Smart Campaign and Accion’s Channels and Technology team, we identified various things that can go wrong for clients of DFS, such as:
- Clients lose their funds after an agent fails to take proper security measures or after a service outage
- Agents charge unauthorized fees for transactions under guise of complicated pricing and fees
- Clients lack or are not offered adequate customer care channels
- Lack of data privacy due to clients not being informed or misinformed on how their data and history is being used or shared
- Agents lacking liquidity serve only their favored clients
While these risks are grounded in anecdotes from the field, there is still much more evidence needed on the consumer harms that actually happen, including where they happen and how often. The Responsible Finance Forum in Perth will host several sessions that present demand-side evidence to help identify high priority risks.
But, what then? Once risks are known, how best to try to minimize them?
> Posted by Jamie M. Zimmerman, Senior Policy Consultant, CGAP
Achieving financial inclusion by 2020 will depend in large part on the proliferation of fast, affordable, and accessible digital financial services (DFS). Indeed these effective, scalable models were a clear theme at the FI2020 Global Forum hosted by CFI last fall. Yet as excitement for DFS dominated much of the public discussion, a small and diverse set of financial inclusion leaders convened a private side-meeting to discuss an often-overlooked question: what are the consumer risks to these new, innovative digital models?
The meeting, co-hosted by CGAP and UNCDF’s Better Than Cash Alliance, introduced the concept of “responsible digital finance” and revealed heightened awareness of and interest in an array of issues related to the potential consumer risks of digital financial services, including:
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