Page 108 - The Digital Financial Services (DFS) Ecosystem

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Ecosystem

Table 9 – Mean Number of Service Linkages by Time Period

Year of Introduction Number of Programs Mean Number of Service Linkages

Prior to 1995 3 6.0
1996-2000 4 3.8

2001-2005 4 3.8

2006-2010 16 4.1
2011-2015 10 2.8

Not specified 11 2.0

This analysis is complicated by the small sample size in many time periods, by the selection of time intervals
for grouping programs, and by the difficulty in truly establishing when a program was introduced, as there
is often a lag between announcing a program and its actual implementation. In addition, the availability of
information on functional applications appears to be related to the year of introducing a program. Four of the
seven programs for which we could find no information on functional associations were launched in the past
ten years, and for two of the other programs the year of introduction is not specified. Two of the three stalled
programs were also launched in the last ten years while the year of launch for the other stalled program is
not specified.

Figure 15 – Average Number of Linkages by Stage of Implementation

Analyzing the average number of service linkages by stage of implementation reveals that the national identity
programs that are still actively enrolling (including the programs that are operational and in use/actively
enrolling) have the highest average number of service linkages, 5.3 and 5.2 linkages respectively (Figure 15). As
discussed in section 3.2, the programs that are still actively enrolling participants tend to have been introduced
more recently, ranging from 2007 to 2015. These more recent programs that are in the initial or pilot stage of
implementation may be more likely to have the technical capacity required to incorporate more diverse types
of services, as the majority of programs with digital (17 of 27) and biometric (21 of 36) components were
launched in the past ten years. Programs that are fully scaled-up and operational have a mean of 3.3 types
of service linkages, which may indicate that the more established programs may have been less ambitious in
scope. Stalled programs have the lowest average number of service linkages (0.3). Programs that are still in
the “planned” stage have evidence of an average of two types of linkages. This finding highlights a limitation
of our analysis, as these linkages are not yet developed but are counted equally with fully-developed large
scale linkages.

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