Speech by Malcolm Johnson, ITU Deputy Secretary-General

ITU Workshop on Digital Financial Services and Financial Inclusion - Welcome Remarks

8 December 2016, ITU Headquarters, Geneva

Ladies and gentlemen
Colleagues

Good morning. It is a pleasure to welcome you to this workshop on Digital Financial Services and Financial Inclusion.

It marks the conclusion of over two years of study by the ITU Focus Group on Digital Financial Services, which I had the pleasure of launching in 2014 when I was Director of the ITU standards bureau.

The Focus Group has benefited from the collaboration of a wide range of interests to translate the ubiquity of mobile communications into broader financial inclusion. It is estimated that there are 2 billion people worldwide without access to a bank account, and of these 1.6 billion use a mobile phone.
 
Developing countries have pioneered the introduction of mobile money and their support has been essential to the Focus Group’s success, so it's good that we have a number participating with us in this workshop.

The success of this work would not have been possible without the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and I would like to thank them on behalf of the ITU and congratulate the chairman of the Focus Group Mr Sacha Polverini and his team – a truly multi-stakeholder effort. In fact I would like to thank all of the Focus Group’s participants for their dedication to the work of the group and contribution to its success.

Greater financial inclusion will be essential for social and economic development by making the digital economy available to all, as was recognized at the G20 Summit held in China last September – and financial inclusion will be important for the achievement of a wide range of sustainable development goals.

Today’s Programme starts by looking at lessons learned from successful deployments in different countries so as to provide an overview of the emerging regulatory interventions that would be needed to create a level playing field for digital financial services, and the main issues that need to be considered by both operators and regulators to enable it to reach critical mass.
 
The main objective of the workshop is to discuss the activities that need to take place in 2017 and beyond, building on the work of the Focus Group and how we can draw maximum possible benefit from its findings. This includes what new ITU standards are needed to provide the technical basis of a secure, interoperable DFS ecosystem, and what collaboration will be needed between telecom and financial-services regulators to build a cohesive enabling regulatory framework for DFS, in particular recognising the fundamental role of providing citizens with unique IDs, a prerequisite to inclusion in formal systems of this kind. This dialogue will receive essential support from the partnership that ITU has established with the Alliance for Financial Inclusion.

We have an excellent line-up of moderators and panelists to share their views on where we stand in the pursuit of these objectives, and I would like to thank them all for their contribution.

I wish you a most informative, productive and enjoyable workshop.