Page 3 - FIGI Symposium

The topic for the Hackathon is Enabling Financial Inclusion with Open and Common
APIs for Merchant Payments. There is an increasing business and regulatory need for
financial institutions to create open APIs, which would enable industry standardization and
reduce costs for deploying such solutions for small merchants.

The results of the Hackathon will be announced during the FIGI Symposium at the award
ceremony on 22 January 2019.

About FIGI Working Groups

FIGI Working Groups will develop knowledge, technical tools, and policy recommenda-
tions on the following three areas: Security, Infrastructure and Trust, Digital ID for Financial
Services, and Electronic Payments Acceptance.

• Security, Infrastructure and Trust Working Group

The main objective is to identify effective mitigation strategies and measures to
address the changing threats and vulnerabilities landscape in the DFS ecosystem
in order to preserve confidentiality of information, integrity of transactions and
availability of the service. The work of the group encompasses the following areas:
address communications infrastructure vulnerabilities (e.g SS7 security), application
security testing, interoperable authentication technologies, security of distributed
ledger technologies and use cases for financial inclusion, monitoring the quality of
service of the network and quality of experience for DFS and digital fraud schemes
and security risks of emerging technologies. The group includes a work stream
on cybersecurity to support financial sector authorities to better understand the
threats, targets, risks and impacts of cyberattacks, and to deploy adequate tools to
increase cybersecurity.

• Digital ID for Financial Services Working Group

The main objective is to identify and accelerate the use of digital identification for
expanding access to, and improving uptake of, financial services. The group explores
the following promising areas, among others: reducing the cost of onboarding
and providing transaction accounts and other financial services to individuals and
MSMEs; the use of IDs to facilitate Government to Person (G2P) payments and
merchant payments; and usage of IDs to establish an authentication framework for
transactions and giving consent. The group complements and is closely linked to
the Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative of the World Bank Group.

• Electronic Payments Acceptance Working Group

The main objective is to foster effective practices for enabling and encouraging
acceptance and use of electronic payments, with an emphasis on person-to-business
(P2B) payments, both for proximity payments at the point of interaction and
e-commerce, and on unserved and underserved groups. The work of the group
encompasses the following areas: pricing and incentives, use of data generated
by an individual or firm’s payment activity, technological and process innovation,
and intermediaries. Each work stream will aim to enhance the understanding of its
theme and potentially provide guidance to regulators.

FIGI Symposium 2019