Page 55 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Recommendations

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Recommendations

Title of recommendation Capacity building for distributed ledger technologies
Working Group Technology, Innovation and Competition

Workstream Distributed Ledger Technology
Audience for recommendation Member States in the DFS

Regulatory (and legal) capacity to understand the technology, engage with industry, design policy around Distrib-
uted Ledger Technologies (DLTs), and properly regulate where needed, is critical to DLT use for financial inclusion.
Thereto, regulators should undertake capacity building exercises with other regulators, ministries, academia, and
industry.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) represents an evolving technology shift that may potentially usher in
a new way of storing and accessing information across the world, as well as disintermediate guarantors,
authenticators, and trusted third parties.

This has the potential to replace many of the established procedures and mechanisms in inter alia finance,
rights managements, and identity management.

There are already commercial implementations of DLTs, for example, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Other are
being tested in limited scale by commercial actors and governments. The momentum though is towards large-
scale launches of DLT.

Regulators need to understand the implications of DLT in their markets and should undertake capacity building
exercises with other regulators, government ministries, academia, and industry to understand the permutations
of DLTs and the impact of its emergence. In particular, any effects of DLTs on financial inclusion should be
explored.

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